By Matthew Ehret
The name Alexander Hamilton invokes radically different things to different people.
Forces on the left side of the political spectrum often appear to promote a certain version of Alexander Hamilton that conforms to a desire to justify centralized planning and empire.
Other figures on the right have ironically also come to endorse Alexander Hamilton, with Romania’s conservative leader Calin Georgescu describing himself on Tucker Carlson as ‘The Alexander Hamilton of Romania’ on April 10, 2025.
Earlier, Donald Trump had endorsed Hamilton at a press conference in 2017, saying, “I think Hamilton is tough to beat”.
More recently, JD Vance encouraged the restoration of the Hamilton-Clay American System, writing, “The strength of the thread is the strength of the fabric. It’s something we’ve forgotten and remembered, again and again, through the American System, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement.”
So what was Hamilton really?
Among ‘alternative media’ networks, a consensus has formed over the years around the thesis that Hamilton was a Rothschild stooge who’s ‘National Bank’ was actually the forerunner to the later Federal Reserve, and who’s writings in the Federalist Papers justified our modern deep state.
From 2006 to 2012, I became rather obsessed with this paradox and plunged myself into a deep study of original writings of those figures who made the American revolution possible.
During that time, I spent years reading through Hamilton’s writings (specifically his four major reports to Congress of 1791-92 as Washington’s Treasury Secretary), and led workshops on the topic.
After mapping out the policies of the American System of Political Economy which Hamilton created across the next two centuries of history (from Hamilton’s 1804 murder to the present), I noticed a very loud irony:
Quite literally every American president who died while in office by either poison or bullet, were re-activating this Hamiltonian system that revolved around the notion of Constitutional banking shaped by Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution, protective tariffs, and internal improvements.
This included, but was not limited to President John Quincy Adams, Senator Henry Clay, President William Harrison (murdered in 1840), Zachary Taylor (murdered in 1851), Abraham Lincoln (murdered 1865), Secretary of State James Blaine, William Garfield (murdered 1880), William McKinley (murdered 1901), Franklin Roosevelt (murdered by poisoning in 1945), and John F. Kennedy (murdered in 1963).
Additionally, world leaders outside the USA who led their nations to break free of the British imperial systems of control from the 18-20th centuries were frequently also students and practitioners of the Hamiltonian system, which included Russia’s ‘American System’ Foreign Minister Sergey Witte, French President Sadi Carnot, Germany’s Friedrich List, China’s first president Sun Yat-sen and Argentina’s Foreign Minister from 1902-1903, Luis Marie Drago.
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Before I jump into my defense of Hamilton, I want to lay out a few points of principle to set the stage…
While this chapter will review some elementary facts of recent history that provide keys to solving these intellectual and moral obstacles, a few general truths are worth enumerating here, upon which the new economic order must be premised.
- A respect of national sovereignty under a win-win system of cooperation and NOT a system of supranational controls under the control of an unelected elite.
- Large scale, long term infrastructure projects which uplift the standards of living of all people, as well as the cognitive powers of all people and the productive powers of labor of all people simultaneously.
- That this process has the natural effect of increasing national capital and consumer consumption per capita and per square kilometer (since higher quality lives lived longer equates to higher rates and quality of consumption both individually and nationally). A viable modern guidebook to explore this system scientifically can be found in the writings of the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche, with a focus upon his 1984 book, So You Wish to Learn All About Economics.[1]
- Taken together, these three variables would tend towards an increase of humanity’s carrying capacity, conditional upon the factor of something ivory tower mathematicians and computer modellers dominant in today’s econometric and climate science worlds detest: HUMAN CREATIVE REASON.The opposing school of political economy, premised as it is upon the British imperial theoreticians who have sought to undermine this tradition, are premised upon the Malthusian assumption that material limits to nature are insurmountable and that population growth will always exceed nature’s capacity to sustain ever growing mouths.
Abraham Lincoln understood this fact all too well 170 years ago, when he said in 1860[2]:
“Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”
This idea was amplified by Lincoln’s leading economic advisor Henry C. Carey, who said in his 1872 Unity of Law[3]:
“The more his power of association, the greater is the tendency toward development of his various faculties; the greater becomes his control of the forces of nature, and the more perfect his own power for self-direction; mental force thus more and more obtaining control over that which is material, the labors of the present over the accumulations of the past…”
If you haven’t noticed it, both Lincoln and Carey recognized that it is by increasing rates of discoveries of hither-to-unknown organizing principles of the universe which allows our species to translate those new discoveries into greater rates of scientific and technological progress. This overcoming of our limits to growth by leaping to new technologies and resources would then establish a guiding framework for planning future investments into R & D with a focus on activities that push the frontiers of human knowledge.
This process embodied by Lincoln and Carey was once known far and wide as the “American System,” and it isn’t a coincidence that EVERY SINGLE American president who died while in office (eight in total) were supporters of this system.
During the period of 1783-1791, the newly established American republic was an agrarian economy in financial ruins with no means to pay off its debts or even the soldiers who fought for years in the revolutionary war. It was only a matter of time before the fragile new nation would come undone and be re-absorbed back into the fold of the British Empire.
The solution to this unsolvable crisis was unveiled by Washington’s former Aide de Camp, and now Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who studied the works of the great dirigiste economists like France’s Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert[4], and introduced a four-fold solution:
- Consolidate all unpayable state debts into a singular federal debt secured by the issuance of new bonds. This was done via his 1790 Report on Public Credit.
- Tie these new bonds to internal improvements like roads, canals, academies and industrial growth, which would create a qualitatively new form of debt that would permit the nation to produce its way out of poverty that would lead to “the augmentation of the active or productive capital of a country”. In this sense Hamilton distinguished bad debt from good debt using the important guiding principle that the “creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.” [To illustrate this more clearly: think of a farmer taking on a debt in order to feed a gambling addiction vs investing his loan into new farm supplies and a tractor.] The thrust of this conception was found in his Report on the Subject of Manufactures of 1791.
- Guide that new national power over finance by a system of national banks subservient to the Constitution and the General Welfare (instead of a system of central banks under the British model that ensured nation states would forever be subservient to the laws of usurious finance).Hamilton’s idea for the national bank was premised on the unification of private profit with the wellbeing of the whole nation in order to overcome the dichotomy of state vs individual rights, which has plagued so much of philosophy and human history[5]This was illustrated in Hamilton’s 1790 Report on a National Bank, and his 1791 On the Constitutionality of a National Bank.Use protective measures where necessary to block foreign dumping of cheap goods into the nation from abroad, which essentially makes it more profitable to purchase industrial goods and farm products locally rather than from abroad. Hamilton also promoted federal incentives/bounties to encourage private enterprises to build things that would be in alignment with the national interests.
In opposition to the Jeffersonian crowd promoting British Free Trade and attacking the idea of manufactures or a strong federal government, Hamilton wrote that there is:
“a general principle … inherent in the very definition of Government and essential to every step of the progress to be made by that of the United States; namely—that every power vested in a Government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite, and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power; and which are not precluded by restrictions & exceptions specified in the constitution; or not immoral, or not contrary to the essential ends of political society.”
Hamilton added that this must exist “to give encouragement to the enterprise of our own merchants, and to advance our navigation and manufactures.”
Throughout all of his works, Hamilton is clear that value is not located in land, gold, money, or any arbitrary value favored by followers of the British School like Adam Smith.
In defending the growth of manufactures and internal improvements, Hamilton states in his Report on Manufacturing that:
“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”
[…]
Via https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-alexander-hamilton
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