Essays
Alexander Hamilton to One-Percenters: "Rubbish!"
By John Clay
Some corporate commentators writing about the Occupy Wall Street movement have claimed that America's founders, particularly Alexander Hamilton, would have sided with the wealthiest one percent and their cut-and-gut fiscal policies.
But history just doesn't support the claim. Although friendly toward business, Alexander Hamilton believed in strong federal government. That’s why he helped write "The Federalist Papers" in defense of the new federal powers set forth in America's Constitution of 1789.
And Hamilton wasn't afraid of federal debt. Rather than demanding, like today’s fiscal conservatives, that debtors pay up, Hamilton proposed that the federal government should help the state governments by assuming their war debts and that the federal government itself should delay paying its own debt.
When money was needed, Hamilton raised new revenue for government. As US treasury secretary, he implemented a new tax upon the citizens, the whisky excise tax, and he joined with federal troops as they forcefully put down a popular rebellion against taxes.
Hamilton also called for high tariffs to reduce imports and protect American jobs, contrary to today's fiscal conservatives who vote for international trade agreements, like NAFTA and the Korea trade agreement, which ship American jobs overseas.
And what about America's other founders? Whose side might they have been on in today's debates?
Thomas Jefferson called for new taxes when he wrote in 1816, "I am a great friend to the improvement of roads, canals, and schools.... If the legislature would add a perpetual tax of a cent a head on the population ... it would set agoing at once, and forever maintain, a system of primary or ward schools, and an university...."
And James Madison warned against favoring an elite few when he said of democracy, in Federalist No. 39, "It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of society, not from an inconsiderable portion, or a favored class of it...."
And it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote, again in 1816, "I hope we shall crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Were Jefferson alive today, he might be occupied with drafting a new declaration of independence, against the tyranny of today's aristocratic one percent. Madison likely would be writing magazine articles defending the ninety-nine percent's right to representation in government. And Hamilton? It's easy to imagine him calling for new revenue, calming fears about the national debt, and calling the one percenters' cut-and-gut fiscal policies exactly what they are: rubbish.
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