Posted on 07/03/2003 5:59:18 AM PDT by Tribune7
When you make that complaint you miss the problem entirely. Nobody doubt's Hamilton's brilliance and for all practical purposes he may have had only the best of intentions at heart. Had he been king, he probably would have been a very capable one and may have done great things for the country.
The problem, however, is that what he did do, what he did advocate, and what he did develop turned devolved very quickly into a hideous beast. It devolved under the hands of less prudent others, but also under the hands of those people that Hamilton considered his own allies during the days he was alive. It devolved because it was prone to abuse and, being prone to abuse, became violative of liberty. In short, Hamilton's policies fell victim to Acton's law as all governments do the second that barriers impeding power are removed or those rare and few virtuous minds who yield from exercising it die.
When a former colony which has had its economy distorted and hampered by the mother country wants to industrialize Government intervention is certainly appropriate and violates none of the requirements of free enterprise.
Nonsense, because that same government intervention almost always harms more than it helps. Capitalism, not further intervention, is the best cure for the woes of previous intervention.
Subsidies and incentives are appropriate programs.
Not so because (1) they distort the market's price mechanism, almost always with unintended consequences and (2) they are highly prone to abuse from rent seekers, welfare whores, and other similar scoundrels trying to make a buck off of the public treasury. There is no diffusing this abuse in any permanent sense. At best you can only hope for that rare virtuous individual to temporarily control it and exercise it free of these problems. But programs almost never go away (as turned out to be the case with the once-temporary "infant industry" protective tariffs and handouts of the early 1800's)
Even Jefferson Davis understood this when he instituted programs to develop Confederate industries.
Jefferson Davis' economic policies were flawed and probably ended up hampering him more than helping. The states righters who opposed him ended up bringing in the money they needed through the market rather than management.
Protectionism is never appropriate in mature economies but for National Defense reasons.
I'll agree completely on that. I simply take it one step further and note that protectionism is not appropriate for much of anything beyond national defense and that includes infant industries. The reason is the same - free markets help infant industries develop faster and better than invervention.
Protectionism does not reduce incentives in anyway but redirects them.
Nonsense. It spawns impediments to the need to compete abroad by establishing artificial domestic monopolies. In many cases monopolies, opperating at sub-optimal output and higher prices, are prone to laziness due to the absence of competition abroad. The so-called "lazy monopoly" then develops with an inferior domestic product at a higher cost to superior ones that are not available due to barriers.
Thus, unprofitable industries become profitable when they can raise their prices due to tariffs.
And that is precisely the problem! You are essentially handing a transfer payment - a welfare handout - to companies that make inferior products! It's the same principle that dooms welfare as a policy - if you give an unemployed person free money in order that he doesn't go without it (it's absence being the primary incentive for him to get a job), he will be encouraged to remain idyl and unemployed, falling back upon the free money he recieves. Just the same, when an inferior product manufacturer gets free money to continue producing that inferior product plus the benefit of not having to compete with existing superior ones abroad, that manufacturer will continue in his mediocrity though now making enough money to get by.
Welfarism's main impact upon Capitalism is that is allows the maintenance of the "Reserve Army of the Unemployed" through a common fund. It raises wage rates by removing some of the labor force. It raises demand by giving the unemployed money to spend.
That's a load of Keynesian bullsh*t. Every penny handed out into the public was removed somewhere else. When government redistributes wealth, some of it is inevitably lost in the redistribution process through waste, inefficiency, and, most of all, the cost in opportunity on what it would have been used for had it not been removed via taxes. Thus whatever gains are made when the welfare slobs spend their checks are inevitably lesser than what gains would have been had the same money not been redistributed. Same goes for protectionist tariffs which ALWAYS have a mathematical dead weight loss AFTER the removed section of the consumer surplus is redistributed through the protected producers and government spending of tariff revenue.
There were no Agrarian Free Marketeers who were even close to going toe-to-toe with Hamilton's ideas. NONE.
Gratuitous claims of Hamiltonian superiority are meaningless no matter how loudly you shout them.
H's "prominent" speech was supposed to remain secret.
...yet it was arguably the most notable speech of his career and certainly the one he is most famous for. You better thank Madison and the others who kept notes for that.
Pretending that that speech overweighed the volumes of writings advocating federalism is dishonest at best.
Nonsense. His advocacy of federalism was out of political pragmatism. He quite literally wanted to make the best of what came of the convention. His true beliefs however were indicated in that speech and he OPENLY SAID THAT TO BE SO. Look at the sentences right after he advocates his form of monarchy. He openly says that the ideas are not _yet_ practical and that they have a snowball's chance of passing. Then he predicts that in the future people will eventually come around to his position, not the other way around.
Ignoring the contrary evidence of his republicanism is equally dishonest.
The only person here who has ignored a portion of Hamilton's philosophy is you. I have made few comments about Hamiltonian federalism beyond what I just stated - that he did indeed take it as a position, but as a pragmatic one - as a political realist. You on the other hand were presented with direct evidence of what Hamilton himself stated to be his ideal - his vision for the future, and that involved a form of monarchy. First you outright denied that it existed. Then I posted the speech, to which you responded by with ABSURD word games in which you literally claimed that "monarchy" did not mean "monarchy" and that Hamilton could not have been a monarchist for failing to meet your own definition of monarchy despite the fact that Hamilton himself said your same definition was invalid, relative, and not binding on his position. Now you claim that the speech doesn't count since it was given in "secret." Your line of excuse making, semantical bullsh*t artistry, and denial of facts while staring them in the face is growing tired.
Nor are people being "dishonest" for simply documenting the irrefutably factual parts of Hamilton that you have simply decided are unappealing. Hamilton was what he was, warts and all, NOT what you desire him to be in your polished and glorified but non-tangible and non-historical mental ideal.
What is significant is that H fought harder than any American for the adoption of the constitution he NEVER fought against that constitution in order to establish a monarchy NEVER.
Good for him! But that doesn't mean he still didn't believe monarchy, in concept, was a better system. If you read that speech (and I don't care if you don't like it - it exists so live with it) he tells us that, in the ideal sense, he prefers the form of monarchy that he described but in a practical sense it would not at the time come into being or gain the support needed to pass.
The Liars Brigade were accusing HIM of undermining the Constitution when that is EXACTLY what THEY were doing.
Nonsense. Once again, simply pointing out Hamilton's warts does not make one a liar. As was also true of Jefferson, Hamilton had many flaws, among them those I have noted on this thread. You may not like them and I may not like them, but they are factually documented and will not go away when you call them names or pretend they don't exist. If you would take the time to read up on the founding some more though (as in the original documents) you will find that many of the founders objected not to Hamilton for "undermining the constitution" but rather for undermining the declaration WITH the constitution. That was Richard Henry Lee's position in the Federal Farmer essays - he charged the federalists with altering the nature of the union (which, by the way, HE designed by drafting the clause of union in the DoI) into a consolidated centralized state that, when in less prudent hands, would become abusive of its own power.
Had you studied any American Monetary History you would have discovered that specie had been deliberately drained from the colonies for a century (not merely the result of the War.)
No sh*t. And what do you think happens when those deliberate forces are removed? What do you think happens when the country begins exporting on its own and the previous drainers of specie have to give something in payment for those exports? That's right. The gold returns inward. It HAS to return because if it doesn't the exporters are not going to give their produce to the merchants. They expect payment and will only trade if they get paid!
Once again, in advocating a federalized monetary policy, you are committing an interventionist fallacy. Capitalism tends to outpace more intervention as a correction for initial intervention. Learn that principle and live by it. Otherwise don't call yourself a capitalist as you are cloaking an amalgamation of interventionist keynesianism, mercantilism, and socialism under its borrowed name and that is by definition an exercise in dishonesty.
Shouting gratuitous assertions in repetition makes them no less false than the first time you stated them.
Here is some reality for you, Abraham Lincoln crushed the serpent head of Evil represented by the Slaverocracy.
That is not reality as Lincoln never professed the abolition of slavery as his purpose for going to war. Slavery was abolished as an incidental consequence of the war due to chance happenings and political conditions that made it permissible and beneficial to one side. That it was abolished was a great thing, but to credit it to those who never sought out to do it in the first place and who acted to do it out of their own benefit rather than any love of liberty is dishonest. Nor did Lincoln crush the concept that is known as "Evil" because he in fact exercised much of the same during his conduct of the war.
He destroyed the enemies of the United States and preserved the Union so that the promise it showed for the world was not extinguished but remains the Light of Freedom it was created to be.
That makes for a nice load of rhetorical bullsh*t, but in substance it is lacking. The so-called "enemies" of the United States were in fact not enemies of any state, people, or land itself but rather enemies of a government that operated in one part of that land as it acted to enforce itself upon another. Failing to distinguish between a country itself and the government of a country, or in this case the states themselves and a government of and over those states, is a dishonest attempt to escape the logical implications of clarity by way of kicking up mud in the water.
What is a "slothful" denial anyway?
As a logical principle it is a term meaning an argument in which its proponent refuses to acknowledge the inescapable factual implications or evidence immediately before him out of either stubborness or stupidity. Put differently, it is a polite way of making note when an individual has his head lodged firmly up his backside.
Nor do I consider twisting statements to make rhetorical points appropriate nor changing the definitions of words.
Yet you do so yourself on a regular basis. Why is that?
All of these are the main aspects of your arguments.
In light of the facts of the situation, I have no choice but to conclude that the above statement is an attempted projection of your own faults onto another. After all, are you not the same individual who claimed that Jefferson's use of the word "state" did not mean "state"? That Jefferson's word "union" did not mean "union"? That Hamilton's description of a "monarch" was not really a "monarch"? The semantical nonsense in which you engage in around here more than amply demonstrates your own participation in - nay, thorough embrace of - the very same thing that you just accused upon others. That you would fail to see this is yet again slothful on your part, not that you would ever admit it. That is the great paradox of slothfulness - an individual who is too stubborn to concede an obvious reality as it stands before him is also often too stubborn to acknowledge that this behavior is slothful. Thus you refuse to admit even now that a "state" is a "state," is a "union" a "union," and a "monarchy" is a "monarchy."
I rarely see a good faith argument from you or your friends. They are all based on misrepresentation, distortions and out right falsehoods. This thread is a perfect illustration.
If that were so you should have no difficulty citing evidence of what you allege without specification. If you so desire, I will happily do the same for your own posts on this thread as examples of what you claim abound. But since you made the charge it is also your burden to substantiate it.
Now certainly Jefferson could be called evasive but never Hamilton.
Once again you withdraw to the Hamilton ideal in your mind as opposed to the Hamilton of reality. Even the noblest of persons engage in some form of evasion at one time or another, and that means Hamilton as well. Like all the others around him, he was a political creature and therefore made political arguments for the sake of achieving a political end. That means some form of evasion or another whether you desire it or not.
Ditto that!
You have yet to demonstrate otherwise, thus quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
and no reputable economist claims the Fed CAUSED the Depression. I don't count the crackpots.
Calling the people who contradict your claim names doesn't make their theories any less true. In the meantime, I need only note that the very same people you dismiss as "crackpots" hold more nobels and higher prestige in the field than the Keynesians and interventionists you glorify could ever dream of. But go ahead. Keep cheering for Paul Krugman's "award" that will never come as he continues to throw his career away.
The very first money of record was that created by the KING of Lydia, a government.
Money precedes coinage in the form of intrinsically valued mediums of exchange. In other words, before there were gold coins there was gold. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
Money is the creation of governments in almost all cases.
That is historically not so. Gold precedes pieces of gold melted into little circles and stamped with a crown. If it did not, nothing would exist to be melted into those circles in the first place.
Barter with unofficial money occasionally occurred when there was no choice (such as in Colonial America.)
Money is a medium of exchange, not barter (which occurs between two commodoties absent of a third medium). An ounce of gold is intrinsically valued to two people who would otherwise not barter their produce, and thus may serve as a medium by which one may obtain the produce of the other. The second that happens it is money, stamp or not.
"[W]hat happened is that [the Federal Reserve] followed policies which led to a decline in the quantity of money by a third. For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing from beginning to end, with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary. At all times, the Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were all the time urging them to do that. So it was, in my opinion, clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression." - Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, 1976
Friedman is generally considered the greatest living economist in the world today. Your dismissive attack upon his view of the depression and attempt to characterize him on the fringe is directly indicative of who the true crackpot is, and you will inevitably meet him the next time you encounter a mirror.
Yes, and this technical prowess comes from thousand upon thousands of PHD's & engineers who do nothing all day but contemplate how to kill, sense, communicate, encrypt,etc. NOT the bloody government school system. This type of research is, after all, what I've done my entire professional career. And believe me it is very difficult to find Americans to do this sort of work due to the shabby educational standards in this nation. We have dozens of job openings that sit unfilled due to the lack of qualified candidates. Easily 1/3 of the scientists I work with are foreign born.
The "slide" was started as a simple case of the business cycle kicking in. The federal reserve had set the stage up to turn that "slide" into a downward spiraling disaster and continued worsening it once the slide kicked in. Thus, exactly as Freidman said, the federal reserve caused the Great Depression to be the Great Depression. You are correct that other policy such as Smoot-Hawley etc. worsened it, but they too may be added to the long list of economic interventionism that brought about such disastrous results.
Nonsense. Money by its economic definition is a medium of exchange.
Money is always the creation of a political entity.
No it isn't. The standard textbook economic definition of money is that which meets the following four characteristics. Money must be:
1. An accepted medium of exchange
2. Easily transportable
3. A store of value
4. A unit of account
Gold commonly fits this definition because it is (1) commonly accepted, (2) of intrinsic value and thus a store of value, (3) easily transported in small portions, and (4) a unit of account since its value is measured in its weight. Nowhere does it say anything about that gold having to be minted first by a government, nor would any credible economist make such a claim.
When I trade one baseball card for another it is not money.
Yeah, cause it's barter.
That government became a hideous beast as Hamilton's programs were expanded by his direct political heirs. If you doubt me, go make a visit to Washington sometime soon and count the number of agencies you see.
Just repeating a mantra does not make it true.
Your own actions and arguments in this thread seem to indicate that you believe otherwise.
Government policies can be very productive in economic development.
In rare and restrained cases, yes they can. But you still miss the point entirely. Even the best of government economic intervention policies is prone to expansion into something far more hideous as it slips away from the watch of more prudent and virtuous persons. And as surely even you can admit, the further we moved away from the founder's generation, the more hideous and expansive our government became.
And we have never had ONE economy which was not government regulated in many ways.
Citing the simple presence of intervention does not make that same intervention any more legitimate or prudent. That is literally akin to the circular absurdity of using regulation to "prove" itself when it is the matter of dispute to begin with.
Hamilton's policies were directly responsible for the development of the industrial capitalism which defeated the Slavers.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. As for the real reason why the north's industrial mercantilism succeeded in the war? Simple - industrial economies by their very nature are better equipped toward war making than economies of other types.
There was no "infant industry" protection during Hamilton's time nor after until the period following the war of 1812 when newly developed (because of the embargoes and War) industries began to demand them.
Actually, most economists identify 1808 as the changing year toward widescale protectionism. As for protection of infant industries, it's earliest recorded proposal is in fact in the inaugural session of Congress by the Pennsylvania delegation. As a result the 1789 tariff, which was initially intended for revenue at a 5% across the board, found protective measures tacked onto it. Massachussetts and Pennsylvania reps added ad valorem protective rates on carriages, nails, iron, glass, and hemp, the highest being triple the revenue rate at 15%. Oh, and BTW, your hero Alex was indeed supportive of infant industry protection per his 1791 "Report on Manufactures." Hamilton espoused protective policies at length:
"This is derived from its supposed tendency to give a monopoly of advantages to particular classes, at the expense of the rest of the community, who, it is affirmed, would be able to procure the requisite supplies of manufactured articles on better terms from foreigners, than from our own Citizens, and who, it is alleged, are reduced to the necessity of paying an enhanced price for whatever they want, by every measure, which obstructs thc free competition of foreign commodities. It is not an unreasonable supposition, that measures, which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign Articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices and it is not to be denied that such is the effect, in a number of Cases; but the fact does not uniformly correspond with the theory. A reduction of prices has, in several instances immediately succeeded the establishment of a domestic manufacture. Whether it be that foreign manufactures endeavour to supplant, by underselling our own, or whatever else be the cause, the effect has been such as is stated, and the reverse of what might have been expected. But though it were true, that the immediate and certain effect of regulations controlling the competition of foreign with domestic fabrics was an increase of Price, it is universally true, that the contrary is the ultimate effect with every successful manufacture. When a domestic manufacture has attained to perfection, and has engaged in the prosecution of it a competant number of Persons, it invariably becomes cheaper. Being free from the heavy charges which attend the importation of foreign commodities, it can be afforded, and accordingly seldom or never fails to be sold Cheaper, in process of time, than was the foreign Article for which it is a substitute."
Monopolies are rarely, if ever, the result of protectionist policies.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. Thus your argument may be rejected.
Tariffs do not provide money to industries. Tariff proceeds goes to the government.
Not true. A protective tariff mathematically shifts money to both the government and the protected industries. This is a result of the supply line's curviture. When a country imposes a tariff upon exports, the tariff's ammount is mathematically added to the pre-tariff price, thus raising the price line and taking with it a segment of the consumer surplus obtained under the previous price. Since that segment of the consumer surplus is divided by the supply curve, it ends up going to more than one place. That to the left of the supply curve is redistributed into the producer surplus by the shift in the price line. That to the right of the supply curve up until the demand curve's intersect is split further. Part of it goes into the government as revenue and the remainder is mathematically lost dead weight. Thus both the government and the protected industry gain financially from the tariff.
You should distinguish between justification and explanation wrt to my comments on welfarism. They were accurate. Many policy makers would rather see government funds spent of pittiful handouts to the welfare class than on arming one half the working class to defend the capitalist class from the other half.
Your assumption that such conditions would arise without welfare is unfounded and fundamentally marxian.
It is a successful policy, hence its universal popularity.
Ad populum attempts to rationalize a policy do not constitute demonstrations of success.
Calmly awaiting the names of these Agrarian economic heavyweights.
Considering that this is the first time you have specifically asked for any names I find it unusual that you would be waiting for anything. Nevertheless I will provide them shortly when I have access to my bookcase at home.
Of course, almost any man's speech before the Constitutional Convention would be close to their most significant speech.
It's certainly the one that Alex is most remembered for! A close second in Hamiltonian literature, of course, is the "Report on Manufactures" in which, contrary to your claims, he advocates infant industry protection.
I have never denied the speech H made indicated his belief that the government of England was the best possible government or that he realized it was not possible in America which would have a Republic or nothing. How did you get the idea I denied this?
You are constructing straw men. You explicitly denied Hamilton's monarchist leanings, not the equivocative jumble of conditional circumstances you just posted above. The famous speech from the constitutional convention is direct and undeniable proof that your previous claim, like so many of the things you state, was a hastily spoken factual error. No ammount of excuse-making, downplaying, or semantical bullsh*t artistry will ever make that speech go away. The fact is he said it and you previously claimed that he did not. That makes you wrong.
I have no inclination to refuse to accept Hamilton for what he was.
Then why do you persist in denying what he was by making factual erronious statements about some of his most basic actions and beliefs? Why did you deny he had monarchist leanings when it is recorded that he espoused them? Why did you deny that he had protectionist leanings when it is recorded that he espoused them? Your Hamilton seems to be a creation of your mind as it conflicts with the factual Hamilton on a regular basis.
How absurd, the Declaration was nothing but a rhetorical device designing to explain why we were rebelling, it had nothing to do with governing.
It was also a legally enacting device to create the United States. It did not set up or design a government and it did not enact a government policy, but it did accomplish two legal acts: (1) it formally separated the colonies from britain and (2) it formally defined the union between those colonies as new states.
Even a second-rater like RH Lee must have understood that.
Ad hominem indulgences against Lee prove nothing of his arguments, which you are obviously unfamiliar with considering that they explicitly describe the pre-federalist union that existed in the wake of the declaration.
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