All Posts Tagged With: "Alexander Hamilton"
The Progressive Income Tax and the Joy of Spending Other People’s Money
On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Kansas to make a stirring speech in support of a federal income tax. “The really big fortune,” Roosevelt said, “the swollen fortune by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men [...]
21Apr2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedAlexander Hamilton and the Perils of State Capitalism
Historians have long praised Alexander Hamilton’s activist government promotion of capitalism. Hamilton’s “financial revolution” brought secure government debt, fluid securities markets, and a modern banking system to the United States. Most scholars believe these factors were responsible for the amazing growth of the U.S. economy in the subsequent 200 years. Thus while George Washington is [...]
25Aug2010 | and Tyler Watts | 7 comments | ContinuedAnti-Populists Made America Great?
New York Times neoconservative columnist David Brooks dislikes populism (“The Populist Addiction,” January 25). “Trust your betters and criticize not their deeds,” he says in effect. After all, when you become a billionaire, you’ll expect others to treat you thus. That any one of us might strike it rich stems, apparently, from the wonderfully open, [...]
20Apr2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | ContinuedTea Party Disconnect?
Someone had done his homework, but it was’t Dick Armey. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports: A member of the [National Press Club] audience passed a question to the moderator, who read it to [Freedom Works chief Dick] Armey: How can the Federalist Papers be an inspiration for the tea party, when their principal [...]
17Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedGovernment Is Better than the Market at Producing Human Capital?
Invoking the Founding Fathers is always risky. We typically use the term as an amalgamation, as in “the Founders believed X.” But as a reading of even one semi-serious history of the American founding will show, their beliefs were divergent and contentious. Many libertarians employ the term “Founders” as if to provide a degree of [...]
1Sep2007 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | ContinuedDemocracy or Republic?
Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University. How often do we hear the claim that our nation is a democracy? Was a democratic form of government the vision of the Founders? As it turns out, the word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents [...]
1Jun2007 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Sovereign Presidency: Is This What the Framers Had in Mind?
American government under the Constitution was supposedly meant to work as follows: Congress, staying within delegated powers and the Bill of Rights, passes laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts sort out ensuing wrangles. This plan ran aground rather early—the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, for example—which raises at least two possibilities: 1) [...]
1Jan2007 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 9 comments | ContinuedOur Presidents and the National Debt
Burton Folsom, Jr. is the Charles Kline Professor in History and Management at Hillsdale College. His book The Myth of the Robber Barons is in its fourth edition. During the last 75 years the United States has failed to balance its annual budget over 90 percent of the time. What’s worse, the government has spent money [...]
1Aug2006 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 44 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – May 2003
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic Books • 2002 • 448 pages • $30.00 hardcover; $16.00 paperback Reviewed by Ivan Eland Max Boot provides a thorough and relatively candid history of the U.S. government’s involvement in small wars. The section of the book on [...]
1May2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedAmerican Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding
At the time of independence, virtually all Americans believed, with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Yet the principle of popular sovereignty does not indicate how a people can be organized so that they may exercise their right to establish new government. [...]
1Sep2000 | David Upham | 0 comments | ContinuedExperiment in Liberty by William Moore Gray III
Sunflower University Press • 1998 • 388 pages • $34.95 Experiment in Liberty is an experiment by a certified public accountant in writing a history of the United States. It is sometimes a flawed experiment and often idiosyncratic in organization; but this book is nonetheless more reliable than most texts now being used in high-school [...]
1Feb2000 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Letters of Centinel: Attacks on the U.S. Constitution, 1787-1788 by Samuel Bryan edited and introduced by Warren Hope
Fifth Season Press • 1998 • 160 pages • $19.99 paperback Understanding the Antifederalist complaint against the Constitution requires a sympathetic ear and an active historical imagination. It is not easy for a generation taught to revere the Constitution as holy writ to recognize what the Antifederalists feared in the form and powers of the [...]
1Jan2000 | Richard M. Gamble | 24 comments | ContinuedCommodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970
Bradley Smith is associate professor of law at Capital University Law School, Columbus, Ohio. To discuss the meaning of property is, in many ways, to discuss the meaning of liberty. If property is an individual right, secure from encroachment by government, then government power is necessarily restricted by the existence of property. If, on the [...]
1May1999 | Bradley A. Smith | 0 comments | ContinuedHamilton’s Blessing by John Steele Gordon
Walker and Company • 1997 • 214 pages • $21.00 Richard Timberlake, a Freeman contributing editor, is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Georgia, Athens. Hamilton’s Blessing, by historian John Steele Gordon, begins by declaring that “The United States, was born in debt.” And the last sentence in Gordon’s conclusion states: “So while [...]
1Feb1998 | Richard H. Timberlake | 0 comments | ContinuedGuardians of the Constitution or Watching Out for Their Own?
Mr. Pilla is a tax litigation consultant and author of nine books on successful methods of dealing with and preventing IRS abuse. By the very terms of the Constitution, all judicial officers, as well as others in government service, “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation” to support the Constitution. Article VI also sets forth [...]
1Sep1997 | Daniel J. Pilla | 2 comments | Continued-
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