Posted on 02/04/2004 12:00:19 PM PST by HenryLeeII
The founders intent, the 'old order', were strong states, bound by a constitution based on individuals rights, whose rights were to be protected by a small but militarily powerful federal union against all usurpers, foreign OR domestic..
2) Jefferson's views had as many problems as Hamilton's -- arguably we'd still be complaining if states had the kind of power Jefferson wanted and the federal government was no more than a weak league of independent commonwealths,
The constitutions BOR's were considered binding on the states till 1833, when the infamous Barron decision, in an futile attempt to avert civil war, set the states 'free' to regulate some of our rights out of existence..
Some states still are busy writing 'regs', -- on the RKBA's, for instance..
and 3) once the Federalists had been vanquished, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans adopted or adapted many Federalist ideas and programs for their own use.
Jeffersonians had never really opposed a relatively powerful union, within constitutional bounds, imo.
Jefferson wasn't a consistent libertarian, or state's righter or free trader or anti-industrialist. As with other politicians -- as with Hamilton -- the sense of the national interest sometimes overcame Jefferson's own political ideology. Today's challenge is how to adapt Jefferson's decentralist vision to current circumstances without taking on all of the historical baggage associated with Jeffersonianism.
Most of that 'baggage' was packed by enemies of conservative republicanism, as I see it..
It's been more than 90 years.
We got screwed on gold, ourselves. Bought at the top, held to the bottom. Ugly. That was right after we got married, it was my husband's inheritance, and I kept my mouth shut and let him take care of it.
He believed all the hard money guys. Whereas, if he'd bought 30 year Treasury bonds, we'd have made a bundle at 13%. Or maybe we'd have been greedy and gone for ten years, that paid 15.68% on 10/02/1981. But he's not the finance type, never was. Now he listens to me.
Yeah, poor grandma got screwed on 13% bonds. ;^)
Well, remember, that for openers the AFDC programs were state programs. As part of the Social Security Act of 1935, the Federal government merely began providing grants to state programs. I believe it was justified under the power to spend under Article 1, Section 8:
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
Madison didn't believe that this language added anything to Federal power; Hamilton disagreed. The first time that the Supreme Court considered this question (United States v. Butler (1936)), it adopted the Hamiltonian position:
"Since the foundation of the Nation, sharp differences of opinion have persisted as to the true interpretation of the phrase. Madison asserted it amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section; that, as the United States is a government of limited and enumerated powers, the grant of power to tax and spend for the general national welfare must be confined to the enumerated legislative fields committed to the Congress. In this view, the phrase is mere tautology, for taxation and appropriation are, or may be, necessary incidents of the exercise of any of the enumerated legislative powers. Hamilton, on the other hand, maintained the clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated, is not restricted in meaning by the grant of them, and Congress consequently has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States. Each contention has had the support of those whose views are entitled to weight. This court has noticed the question, but has never found it necessary to decide which is the true construction. Mr. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, espouses the Hamiltonian position. We shall not review the writings of public men and commentators or discuss the legislative practice. Study of all these leads us to conclude that the reading advocated by Mr. Justice Story is the correct one. While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of § 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution."
Hamilton has been extremely influential in our Constitutional development and in the growth of Federal power.
Your point about slavery in the agrarian south is a valid one, but the North wasn't free of slaves because it was industrialized -- it was free of slaves simply because it didn't need them. By the time the North had become heavily industrialized in the 19th century, they were able to rely on Irish immigrants to fill many of the roles that were not much better than that of a slave (especially in the mining industry).
Exactly. Most of the battles in New York and New Jersey were losing affairs for the colonial army.
I was talking specifically about New York City. I believe Britain controlled the city for the duration of the war, and other than a single skirmish in what is now Brooklyn (I think) nothing much happened there. I've always said that it's no accident that New York City today is one of the most left-leaning jurisdictions in the United States. The people of New York were British Loyalists back then, and they're Marxists today. The phrase "big government" has never been out of fashion there.
I think you're wrong about that. Yes, the Whiskey Rebellion was directed at the government -- but certainly not the government that the U.S. Constitution "produced."
In the minds of those who took part in the rebellion, the excise tax on whiskey that was passed by Congress in 1791 was a blatant violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution ("The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States . . ."). By taxing one specific type of alcohol (whiskey) while exempting others (wine and ale), Congress was acting in a manner remarkably similar to today's anti-tobacco Nazis -- they taxed the stuff that was produced in the rural western parts of the states (and served as a major source of revenue for farmers who worked the poor soil of the Appalachian foothills), while exempting the stuff produced consumed by the majority of the people (voters) in the more densely population areas along the seaboard.
The farmers in western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina took one look at the excise tax and said, "Bullsh!t -- as far as we're concerned, you bastards in the Federal government are no different than the British bastards we threw out of this place not that long ago."
Thus opened a rift between the rural farmers of Appalachia and the dwellers of the more heavily-populated areas along the coast -- a rift that eventually generated the moonshining industry, stock car racing, and a clear divide in the 2000 presidential election between what we now know as "Red" and "Blue" areas of the country.
JMHO.................In many ways the Civil War was a 'proxy' fight for these twin human dynamos: Hamilton and Jefferson.
As the article explains, we owe the mercantilization (the North at that time) to Hamilton while Jefferson wanted to sit on his slave-driven, agrarial, mountain top like a French Philosopher thinking great thoughts (Southern Aristocracy).
Hamilton, and the North, won.
I've never seen Weekend at Bernies. Please explain. Thank you.
foreverfree
At the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, there were only 3 banks in the entire country, and they were in New York and Philadelphia. Money did not circulate on the frontier.
The US had not yet begun minting our first coins of gold, silver and base metals. Some states had minted coins, but most money circulating in the cities was gold and silver of British, French or Spanish manufacture. The newer coins had known values. Older coins had been clipped so many times that a merchant would weigh the coins to assign a value before accepting them.
On the frontier it was worse, and there was an established barter system in place based on alcohol. The smallholders of Kentucky or western Pennsylvania preserved the value of their orchards and fields by fermenting the products thereof. A barrel of beer, ale, stout or porter -- or a cask of brandy or whiskey -- had a known value when bartered for a side of bacon or a barrel of flour.
The tax on whiskey rankled because it struck right at the financial core of frontier life: There was no money in the sense we know it. It reminded people too much of the British "revenooers" who knocked down doors to collect taxes for King George, and people had just fought a war for economic self-determination so as to put an end to all that. Hamilton and Washington picked western Pennsylvania for a test case because, had they picked Kentucky, the secession question would have opened up a whole lot sooner. The fix was in as far as western Pennsylvania was concerned.
The tax on whiskey showed questionable judgment.
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