But, ultimately, it does not matter whether Hamilton was a good guy or not. We cannot go back, and we have the system we have, corrupt as it is.
” However, there must be some legitimate controversy over Hamilton’s embrace of big government and big banks, or else otherwise reasonable folks like the Mises Institute would not write about it. “
Libertarians have their own biases and exaggerate what “big government” amounted to in 1789. Moreover there were maybe three banks in all of the United States when Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury.
If you want to read a decent book on Alexander Hamilton get a copy of Forrest McDonald’s biography. McDonald began with a bias against Hamilton when he began researching his book but ended up regarding him as an indispensable genius without whom the nascent United States would have failed.
Hamilton’s financial genius converted the crushing debt and near worthless currency inherited from the Articles government into a valuable asset in the form of a funded public debt and a currency that was valued equal to gold. This was no small feat and the American gov’t would have collapsed if he hadn’t managed to do it.