Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo is best known for his trenchant demolition of “Honest Abe” Lincoln. But his work on Lincoln is just part of a larger framework that helps us understand American history. Throughout our history, statist Hamiltonians and freedom-loving Jeffersonians have clashed.
Tom exposes the Hamiltonian plot against our liberty here:
“In his essay, “Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard wrote of how states preserve their power with a number of tools, most notably an alliance with “intellectuals.” In return for power, positions, and pelf, the “intellectuals” work diligently to persuade “the majority” that “their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable.” This is the “the vital stock task of the intellectuals.” The “molding of opinion” is what “the State most desperately needs” if it is to maintain is powers, wrote Rothbard. The citizens themselves do not invent theories of the benevolent state; that is the job of the “intellectuals.”
In his outstanding new book, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (foreword by Ron Paul), historian Brion McClanahan explains with sterling scholarship how one “intellectual” in particular, Alexander Hamilton, invented out of whole cloth a mythical founding of the American state that bears no resemblance at all to the actual, historical founding. His intellectual successors, most notably Supreme Court justices John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Hugo Black, cemented this myth of the benevolent, consolidated, monopolistic state through decades of legal opinions based on a mountain of lies.
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This of course is exactly what John C. Calhoun observed during his time when he wrote in his 1850 Disquisition on Government that a written constitution would inevitably be “rewritten” by “the party of government” in a way that would neuter it as a source of limitations on governmental powers.
Hamilton has become “the new hero of the Left,” writes McClanahan, for the Left has finally realized that he was “the architect of modern big government in America,” something that many conservatives have long failed to realize. Hamilton’s voluminous writings formed the bedrock for generations of legalistic arguments that perverted the Constitution and created the “insane modern leftist legal world.” It was Hamilton and his ideological heirs who invented the “loose construction” and “implied powers” theories of the constitution, which has so “screwed up” America.
McClanahan shows what a duplicitous liar Hamilton was, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, saying one thing in his Federalist Papers essays, and then spending the rest of his life doing exactly the opposite. He defended states’ rights and federalism in these essays but when pressed by Jefferson and Madison, he “would often backtrack and advance positions he favored during the Philadelphia Convention, namely for a supreme central authority with virtually unlimited power, particularly for the executive branch.” This was “the real Hamilton,” who “made a habit of lying when the need arose.”
It was Hamilton who first spread the outrageous, ahistorical lie that the states were never sovereign and that the Constitution was somehow ratified by “the whole people” and not by state conventions, as required by Article 7 of the Constitution itself. It was Hamilton who Calhoun must have been thinking about when he warned of “intellectuals” reinterpreting the constitution in a way that would essentially destroy it. Hamilton’s lifelong goal, as McClanahan demonstrates, was to subjugate the citizens of the states to the central government and render the states irrelevant and powerless. The most Hamiltonian of all presidents, Abraham Lincoln, finally achieved this goal.
The Machiavellian Hamilton as Treasury Secretary assumed the state war debts as a means of creating a giant system of political patronage. He put unemployed war veterans on the dole, thereby initiating the American welfare state. He led an invasion of Pennsylvania with 15,000 conscripts to attempt to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Nothing came of his invasion since all the whiskey tax “rebels” were pardoned by George Washington. Nevertheless, the invasion served Hamilton’s purpose of allowing him to denounce all resisters of state power as somehow being clones of the violent French Jacobins.
