 The topic is economic nationalism, the curse of economic nationalism, and part of it comes from my book on Hamilton, which I called Hamilton's Curse, and because it was part of it is a response to a book written by a pretty well-known business historian named John Steele Gordon. He wrote a book called Hamilton's Blessing, and because Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury Secretary, once said that a large public debt is a national blessing. His reasoning was very Machiavellian. There's a word for you. I look that up on Google, the Machiavellian, because his reasoning was that if the government issues a lot of debt, it's mostly the affluent people of the country who have the money to buy the government bonds, and therefore they will be tied to the government politically because they will be a permanent lobbying force for higher taxes to make sure there's enough money in the Treasury to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds. That was his chain of reasoning because when the Constitution was ratified, he threw a fit. He called it a frail and worthless fabric, and he spent the rest of his life trying to undermine the constitutional limits on government. When he was Treasury Secretary, he badgered George Washington by saying we need a government of more energy. He wanted government to be much bigger than what the Constitution allowed for, and this was part of his scheme. So anyway, that's just sort of why I came up with the title Hamilton's Curse. Even to this day, we still have people writing books saying, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's have a big government debt. Look up online, all you young students, the national debt clock. It's in Times Square in New York City, and it goes a thousand miles an hour, adding dollar after dollar after dollar, how much debt, and even says how much you owe today or how much a baby born tomorrow will owe already if the debt were ever to be paid off. But anyway, that's why the Curse of Economic Nationalism. Economic nationalism is essentially and always has been a euphemism or maybe a synonym for mercantilism, really, and Murray Rothbard defined mercantilism. This was the economic system that prevailed in much of Europe in the 1600s, 1700s, up into the 1800s, and Murray defined it as basically a system, a collection of policies that benefit producers at the expense of consumers and everyone else. That's basically mercantilism, and I'll get into more detail in a little bit. And so what I'm going to say for the rest of my time is part economics and part history. I don't want to bore the Europeans in the audience with too much American history. I know we have some European students, but it will be some of that. And I'm going to start off, again, with Murray Rothbard, a little snippet from his book, The Mystery of Banking, which I highly recommend everyone read if you haven't read it. And he remarks on an incredible phenomenon that the American colonists fought a revolution to secede from the British mercantilist system. The taxation without representation was their slogan, and they had been protesting King George III's mercantilist trade laws that discriminated against Americans. It was mercantilism, a set of policies set up to benefit politically connected British manufacturers at the expense of everybody else. And so they fought a revolution to secede against that system. But there was a group of Americans, very prominent Americans, wealthy Americans and influential Americans who wanted to keep that system, that they just fought an eight-year-long revolution to get away from, because they understood that if you're on the money collecting end of mercantilism, it's a good gig. If you're on the paying end, not true. It's not a good idea if you're on the paying end. But if you're on the money collecting end, it's a good thing. It's good to be the king, as Mel Brooks said in that movie, the history of the world, part 10 or whatever part that was. And when he portrayed the king of France, someone, one of his aides would come in and dump a big pallet of gold bars next to him. And his laugh line was, it's good to be the king. And that's how I view the Hamilton and the Federalists who were the originators of American mercantilism. And here's what Murray Rothbard says in The Mystery of Banking about this. Economic nationalism or mercantilism. He said their purpose, and they were led by Robert Morris, who was probably arguably the wealthiest man in America. He was basically a defense contractor during the revolution. And he was the big string puller behind Alexander Hamilton, the young Hamilton, who was still in his 20s at the time. He said their purpose was this, quote, I'm quoting Murray Rothbard, to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that in Great Britain, against which the colonists had rebelled. The object was to have a strong central government, particularly a strong president or king as chief executive. Imagine that they just fought a revolution against the king and they want a big influential part of the American political scene. Wanted a king, wanted to bring back a king as chief executive built up by high taxes and heavy public debt. The strong government was to impose high tariffs to subsidize domestic manufacturers, develop a big Navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports, and launch a massive system of internal public works. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain. Sounds a lot like the Trump administration and the Biden administration, doesn't it? If you look at these policies that they're talking about. And in mentioning, speaking of Trump, by the way, his very first speech after he was elected on economics, he went to Lexington, Kentucky, and paid homage to Henry Clay. Henry Clay, the congressman, was the political heir to Hamilton. And he picked up the mantle of this mercantilist system after Hamilton died. I don't know if you all remember the history of this. Hamilton was shot dead by Aaron Burr in a duel. And our old friend Gary North told me once that he started up an Aaron Burr society once. And they had ball caps. And the slogan on the back said, not soon enough was the slogan. He wasn't a fan of Hamilton. So that's where this started, at the beginning of America, economic nationalism, which is just basically a way of sneaking mercantilism into the economy. And Murray goes on to call Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris' youthful disciple. His youthful disciple. So I call him his sort of political water carrier. He was Morris who sent Hamilton into the Washington administration. And probably the most famous biography of Hamilton is the one by Ron Cherno. And this Broadway play called Hamilton is supposedly based on the book by Cherno. And Cherno himself, they gave him a small role in the play. And that play has made $650 million so far, just on Broadway, not everything else, all the merchandise and everything like that. It's a very, very popular thing. And Cherno writes about how at the end of the revolution, Hamilton is scheming to get a big job in the new George Washington administration after the revolution. And Robert Morris wants to put him in as his treasury secretary, the first treasury secretary. Morris was actually the first. They called it superintendent of finance. And he had the first job, but then he wanted his man, Hamilton in. And George Washington says to Hamilton, I didn't know you knew anything about finance. We never talked about it. But if Mr. Morris wants you to have the job, the job is yours. Ron Cherno wrote that in his book. So Hamilton didn't really know anything. Here's what Cherno says. He says, when he decided this is the job he wanted, because Robert Morris told him that's the job you want. And he said, since he didn't know anything about finance, he said Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering, who was George Washington's adjutant general in the revolution. He was also George Washington's secretary of state and secretary of war, senator from Massachusetts later on, sent him some primers that included tracks written by the English clergyman and polemicist Richard Price and his all-purpose crib notes, postal weights, universal dictionary of trade and commerce. So he read a dictionary. That was Hamilton's education and economics. He read a dictionary of words, definition of words, just enough. And he was a very brilliant lawyer. And so you give a brilliant lawyer a new dictionary with all new words. He'll do something with it. He'll use it. Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Robert Morris that's set for the full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank, says Ron Cherno. And I read this letter. I have it. I cite it in a paper of mine. If anybody is interested in it, I'll give you the citation. And despite all these references that he said that he read, he basically said this, what we need to have is protectionist tariffs, a central bank, taxes on land, poll taxes, and a large public debt. That's it. That was in the letter. That's what he learned from all this, the total sum of Alexander Hamilton's economic education. That's what he got. Now, not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago, there was an article that I posted a blog on lourockwell.com about how the Biden administration is giving the Puerto Rican socialist, who's the director of this play on Broadway, $50 million. They've already made $650 million just from the play alone, not to mention all the merchandise and everything else, TV rights and all this. And they're giving them $50 million because during the lockdown, they couldn't have put the play on on Broadway because New York City was locked down. And so to compensate them for that, they're giving them $50 million of taxpayers' dollars. And so I blogged about it. And Lou liked it so much, he asked me to turn it into a short article. So it appeared as a blog and as an article. And the title I gave it was Corporate Welfare for a Play About the Founding Father of Corporate Welfare. So the establishment, the leftist establishment, loves Hamilton, the Founding Father of mercantilism, of fascism basically is a combination of business and government. And so I'm not going to tell you the whole story about how this all came into being. I'll tell you part of it. The corporate welfare part of the story is Hamilton and the federalists, they picked up the mantle from the British mercantilists who they learned from. And Hamilton, by the way, grew up in St. Croix in the Caribbean. And he supposedly never knew who his real father was. His mother gave birth to him without the father around. But then he worked as a clerk for some British slave owning plantation owners in the Caribbean. And they sent him to what is now Columbia University. And I suspect, I have no evidence of this at all, I suspect that one of the British slave owners was probably his father. Yes, he was a brilliant guy. But, jeez, they sent him to New York. They paid for him with school New York. That's something a father would do. And so that's just a tidbit about Hamilton. And so he's beloved by the left and the right. When my book came out on Hamilton's Curse, my publisher Random House wrote such a good press release that the Morning Joe television show immediately sent a limo to my house to pick me up at 6 o'clock in the morning to put me on the TV show, the Morning Joe TV show, because it was right after the crash of 08. And they sent me down next to Pat Buchanan. And Pat, the first thing he says to me, he looks at me and he says, Alexander Hamilton is my hero. So here, they had me on. I wrote a whole book trashing Alexander Hamilton. And so it was pretty much a shouting match. They even brought in the three of them kind of yelled at me for a while and wouldn't let me talk. And that was enough. They brought some guy from New York in on a screen. They had him blabber away. So anyway, I think I just sat there and made some smart comment about Aaron Burr at the end of it because it was futile. That's the same thing. So the corporate welfare story, though, Hamilton championed that. They called it internal improvements. Today, they call it infrastructure spending, government subsidies. Jefferson was opposed to it. He didn't go along with it. When he was president, he said that you have to amend the Constitution first. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, when he was president, the very last thing he did in office was veto a spending bill that included some money for a road building. He said it's not one of the delegated powers. Therefore, the government cannot spend money. James Monroe, same thing. He vetoed it. So president after president vetoed it. And it was almost uniformly Southerners who vetoed these bills. Not 100%. There were Southern mercantilists, and there were Northern free traders in America, and Northern more libertarian oriented. But in the North, they were in the minority. In the South, they were the majority, as far as opposing all of this thing. So they didn't get any federal subsidies to speak of for corporations. Hamilton failed at that during his time. But then the states, the same political organizations, went after the states. And state after state adopted government subsidies for road building and canal building during the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s. And it turned out to be a total debacle. By the time you get to the Civil War era, there's a book on this by an author, an historian named Goodrich on internal improvements. They called it back in those days. And he says, by the time you get to the American Civil War 1860, every state in America had amended its constitution to prohibit government subsidies to corporations for anything. In Illinois, for example, Lincoln himself, when he was in the Illinois legislature, got the legislature to allocate $11 million for road and canal building. This was 1837, long before he ran for president or long before he didn't utter a single word about slavery for another 20 years after that. And so they spent all this money. Much of it was stolen, and not a single road was completed in the state of Illinois. So the people of Illinois were put in a debt for the next several decades to pay off that $11 million in 1837 dollars for there. And every other state did that, except for one exception. The only state that did not amend its constitution to prohibit this was Massachusetts before the Civil War era in the 1860s. So they did have some success there. And the closest they came to succeeding in adopting the system of protectionism, corporate welfare, and a national bank was in 1840. Henry Clay was in charge of the Whig Party in Congress, a very influential man, and they had the votes in Congress. And they finally elected a Whig president, Lou Rockwell's favorite president, William Henry Harrison, also my favorite president. Because William Henry Harrison was inaugurated and died a month later, and so he couldn't have done much damage. That's why he's our favorite president. And what happened was his vice president was John Tyler. Now, there's a libertarian who wrote a book called Recarving Rushmore. Ivan Eland is his name. Independent Institute published this book. And he ranks all the presidents. The history profession in America has all these rankings of American presidents that they come out with from time to time. And their criterion are usually whoever racks up the biggest debt, raises taxes the most, and gets us into the most wars that kill the most people, those are the greatest. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Wilson, always at the top. Always at the top. Ivan Eland did the opposite. Which presidents did the best job at protecting life, liberty, and property? That's an odd thing to think of, isn't it, government to try to do? And he puts John Tyler number one. Okay, Lincoln, Roosevelt, they're all way down there at the bottom of his list. Why does he put John Tyler number one? Well, the Whigs apparently just had John Tyler as their vice president, because their campaign theme was Tippi Canoe and Tyler too. There was a, William Henry Harrison was the hero of the battle of Tippi Canoe, wherever that was. And so that was one thing. And Tyler too kind of rhymed with that. And so they, let's make him our vice president. But he turned out to be a Jeffersonian. And he vetoed everything. He vetoed a bank bill, he vetoed protectionist tariffs, he vetoed the internal improvement subsidies program. And so Clay and the Whigs threw a fit. They burned John Tyler and Effigy in front of the White House and kicked him out of the Whig party. So he was a president for four years, but he didn't have a party affiliation. They kicked them out. And so that was a big feather in his cap, wasn't it, a badge of honor that he did that. So that didn't succeed either, either. Protectionism, Hamilton and my short little article on lourockwell.com, I call Hamilton an economic ignoramus. Because the establishment says the opposite. They say, well, he was an economic genius who created the American economy. As though one man, he was like an early Klaus Schwab. They think they can push a button and there's the economy, reset the whole economy, push the reset button and we've got it. And they say things like that, but of course that's nonsense as far as that goes. But on protectionism, he read the pamphlets by British mercantilists and he called transportation costs useless labor. And he argued that anything that involves transportation costs should be banned. It should not be allowed to be imported into the United States. So if a man in England sells shoes and he wants to compete by shipping the shoes across the Atlantic Ocean and selling them in New England, shouldn't allow it, it should be outlawed to do that. He also argued that competition will cause higher prices because after all, competition costs businesses money. It costs money to compete. And when you spend that money to compete, maybe you pay for advertising, for example. Well, then prices are gonna go up because the costs go up, prices are gonna go up. And that was his reasoning. And that was sort of the total sum of John Kenneth Galbraith's economics. Also, he was a big critic of advertising during his whole career, that's what he was known for. So he had all these oddball, goofy ideas and Abraham Lincoln adopted the exact same arguments. His speeches on protectionism were pure Hamiltonian. He was, I called him the political son of Alexander Hamilton. And so we finally got all this. After all the vetoes by Madison and Monroe and other presidents, Andrew Jackson of some of this, we finally got protectionist tariffs during the American Civil War. 1857 was sort of the high watermark in America free trade in the 19th century. The average tariff rate was only 15%. But by the time the war was over, it was about 60%. And it remained there until the income tax came in in 1913. So that was not just a war tariff. It was the policy of the Republican Party. They finally got protectionism that they wanted. Murray Rothbard also writes very favorably in his history of money in banking in America about the Jacksonians. And every time I write something on the web about Jackson and he did some good things and some bad things. So every time I write anything good about Jackson, I get bombarded with emails by people saying, don't you know he killed all those seminal Indians in Florida? Well, yes, when he was a general, he was a military general and they tried to eradicate the Seminoles from the state of Florida for what is now the state of Florida. Yes, yeah, so he did some bad things. But you don't have to agree with everything Andrew Jackson ever did in order to praise him for the good things. He'd condemn him for this sort of stuff and praise him for the say that it was a good thing. He did other things. The best good thing that he did was he vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. And this was Hamilton did succeed in convincing George Washington to adopt a national bank, the Bank of the United States. It had a 20 year charter and it was modeled after the Bank of England. And here's what Hamilton said about this. Oh, Murray actually said that the central bank was the keystone of the whole thing. And here's what Hamilton himself said about his banks. Great Britain is indebted for the immense efforts she has been able to make in so many illustrious and successful wars because of the existence of the Bank of England. So yay. We have a bank that can expand the money supplies and make it cheaper to get into, to be an imperialist in Europe. And he spoke about imperial glory. He said, the tendency of a national bank is to increase public and private credit and the former gives power to the state for the protection of its rights and interests. Okay, exactly. That's exactly why the Jeffersonians opposed them. They didn't want something to aggrandize the state, but Hamilton did and that's why the Pat Buchanan's of the world, you know, the conservative, the right wing status like Pat Buchanan, as well as the left wing status worship Hamilton so much, he's one of them. And he was a brilliant guy and which is why Jefferson feared him so much. He knew he had these devious plots in mind and he was brilliant and that's a dangerous combination. That's a good recipe for a tyrant, as far as that is concerned. So Andrew Jackson vetoed the rechartering. The bank was not rechartered after the first 20 years, but then the War of 1812 came and that was used as an excuse to monetize the debt from the war to bring back the bank in 1817, January of 1817 and then it was up for a rechartering again and it was Jackson who vetoed it. And this is one of my favorite political speeches, American political speeches, is Andrew Jackson's veto of the bank and I can't resist reading that you're just part of it. It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Do you imagine a American president saying something like that today? Although I will say Trump's first and all girl address was great when he was sitting there. He had George W. Bush sitting there and Clinton was there and he was just ripping them all a new one as he's saying and goes and they were all making eyes at each other. I remember watching this on TV that Bush and Clinton were all rolling their eyes at each other over this but he was saying things like the Washington establishment has made itself enormously rich at the expense of you and the people and oh my God, that's speaking the truth. Distinctions in society, this is Jackson. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents of education or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions and government but every man is equally entitled to protection by law but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions to grant titles, gratuities and exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves have a right to complain the injustice of their government. So he was saying that this bank, this is what this bank was doing. It was creating exclusive privileges for the rich politically connected and therefore he vetoed it. And when I wrote this, when I included this in my book, I went out and I gathered some history books because I wanted to see, well, what does the American history profession say about this, you know, if you were to go to college and you take a history, American history course and you read about this, what are they saying? And the books that I found were sort of universal condemnation of Andrew Jackson for saying this, saying these things, you know, if you're, if you have any libertarian leanings, you would think, well, this is fabulous. This is a great statement but the American history profession, the books I saw were uniformly really nasty critiques of all this. Okay. And so on the issue of protectionism, you know, as I said, by the time you get to 1857, there was no bank. We had free trade, basically, tariff rate was 15%. No federal corporate welfare to speak of. And the states had all outlined state-funded welfare, well, outlawed it all except for Massachusetts in the United States. And so, but that all radically changed very quickly. Like I said, the Lincoln administration adopted 60% tariffs and kept them in place for 60 years. And also the first big massive corporate welfare boondoggle came into being with the government subsidies of the Transcontinental Railroads. They created two government subsidized railroads, the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific. And Lincoln, by the way, one of the stories about Lincoln was that in 1857, long before he ran for president, he was a wealthy railroad lawyer. He was the general counsel for the Illinois Central for a while. He represented all the big railroads in the Midwest. He was offered the job of general counsel of the New York Central Railroad. He traveled around the Midwest in a private rail car, courtesy of the Illinois Central with an entourage of executives from the corporation, which at the time was probably the biggest corporation in America, the Illinois Central Railroad. And that's who it was. And he invested in land in Council Bluffs, Iowa and at the time of all the places Council Bluffs, Iowa. And when he became president, the first thing, one of the first things he did was, the war was on. I mean, the Confederate Army was massing in Manassas, Virginia. And he calls Congress back. Congress was out of session. He calls Congress back in June, right before this big, first big battle was about to occur. And the purpose of calling them back was to get the ball rolling on the Pacific Railroad Bill. That's the purpose, which they did. And the Pacific Railroad Bill gave the president the exclusive right to determine the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, where they were gonna start building Transcontinental Railroad. Anybody know where Abe Lincoln chose? I'm gonna take a guess, where he chose to start building the railroad. Council Bluffs, Iowa, what a coincidence. He just happened to, it was still known as a language called Lincoln's Hill now in Council Bluffs, Iowa. So he must have made a fortune in real estate speculation by doing that. That was, talk about insider trading. That was a real political insider trading. So that happened, and if you wanna read an interesting story in my book, How Capitalism Saved America, I'll tell the whole story of how James J. Hill seemed to, and his business partners, he created the Great Northern Railroad that built a Transcontinental without any government subsidies, even land grants. They paid the Indians for rights away with cattle or whatever they could trade for in the planes, whereas the government subsidized railroads, if they ran into the Indians, they would call in the army to kill all the Indians. And in fact, General Sherman himself, after the Civil War was over, was put in charge of the Indian Wars for 25 years from 1865 to 1890. And the purpose was to just eradicate the planes Indians from the Great Plains to make way for the railroads. That's, those were Sherman's exact words to make way for the railroads, and they did. They ended up killing some 45 or 50,000 Indians, and the rest were put into concentration camps called reservations in the West, but it was a form of corporate welfare. It was just a veiled form of corporate welfare for the railroad corporations, which were the financial lifeblood of the Republican Party at the time. Should sound familiar to today. You know, some things never changed, do they? So that took into place, you know, the biggest scandal in American political history up to that point, the Credite-Mabillier scandal, took place, and I don't have a board here, but the roots, it's kind of comical to see the roots. James J. Hill, you know, he's a private entrepreneur, privately funded entrepreneur, so he had to find the shortest, quickest route to the West Coast, which he did. He hired some engineers who discovered the Mariahs Pass through the Rockies, which had been discovered by Lewis and Clark in 1803, and no one had ever found it after that, and his engineers found it, and it cut 100 miles off his route, which was, you know, gold back in those days. You know, it was worth a lot of money, whereas if you were to look at a map of the government subsidized railroads, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti, because every member of Congress would say, if you want my vote for more subsidies, you have to run a line over to my town of 500 people over here, and then over there, and over there. So if you look at the, there is a map online of the Union Pacific line, and it's all over the place. You think, you know, what an insane person decided to try to make a profit by having this kind of railroad with all these extensions in the middle of nowhere where there's like no customers, sorry, you know, maybe the congressman himself would be the only customer. I don't know, that's possible. So that happened. My students used to always laugh, get a big billy laugh out of that, because I would put it on a screen, because I put the map of the Great Northern, you know, it's like a straight line across the Rocky Mountains, and then the Union Pacific is the big bowl of spaghetti. And it's kind of ridiculous, okay. Now, and so economic, that's why, this is all why I call the economic nationalism a curse. The Hamiltonians have basically won the argument. It took a long time. They didn't have any success at all to speak of until the Civil War, and that sort of waxed and waned. But if you look at today, you know, one of the first things President George W. Bush did was to impose steel on tariffs. Trump did the same thing. The Democrats are historically protectionists because of the unions, as far as that goes. Trump was, like I said, his first economic speech was in Lexicon, Kentucky, to pay homage to another founding father of mercantilism and economic nationalism, Henry Clay. He was in favor of the same things, protectionism, corporate welfare, various subsidies to corporations, and internal improvements, you know, member Trump proposed a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, and Biden is doing the same thing. So this is a system that we've adopted economic nationalism, which is really 21st century mercantilism. It's no different than any of that. And so that's my story for today. And then we have some time for a Q&A, if you have questions about this. Comments, anything? You can applaud if you want to. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. He was kind of... Thank you. Yes, sir. What do you think of Michael Mallis' argument that Hamilton was a good founding father because of his monarchist tendencies and monarchism is a Confederate and his head instructor in democracy? Michael Mallis praises Hamilton because he was a monarchist. Yeah, I had a quote here from, let's see if I can read you a quote, from Hamilton himself. Yeah, here's what Hamilton said. This is a quote from Hamilton. I was among the first who were convinced that an administration by single men was essential to the proper management of the affairs of this country. So he did advocate a permanent president. Yeah, I'm not sure why that would be a good idea. You know, if you ever read the law by Friedrich Bastia, I recommend everybody read it. If you haven't read the law, read the law by Friedrich Bastia. And he makes the point that he's criticizing socialism and he says, well, you can have socialism with a dictator or you can have socialism with a democracy. If a Congress votes for some law that is uniform and everyone is compelled to obey that law, that's law for socialism, how is that different than if a king decrees the same law? And so, yeah, you can have a monarchy that is evil and corrupt. And you can have a monarchy that's not. Now, the Hans Hoppe has written a whole book, The Democracy of the God that Failed, making the case that the incentive system in democracy inevitably evolves into socialism and all these bad things. And whereas at least the king owns the property and he's not apt to destroy his own property or the monarchy of Michael Malus makes that argument. Yeah, he does. Yeah, but then if you look at history, there are a lot of examples of kings destroying things. Joseph Stalin was probably the richest man in America in the world during his time because he essentially owned all of Russia. He was the owner of Russia and he was not a very productive guy as far as that is concerned, as far as being a king. And so, yeah, king can be another word for dictator. And so it depends on what kind of culture you have and what kind of beliefs people have. Some of the Middle Eastern kings are not too awful compared to Chuck Schumer, let's say, or something like that. One of my students, I'm mentioning Chuck Schumer, one of my students who came to Mises Yu years ago was in the Marine Corps before he even went to college and he ended his career in the Marines as a sniper instructor. And our friend, the late Ralph Raco once said to him, his name was Ken, he said, Ken, could you pick out Chuck Schumer out of a crowd? This is a Marine Corps sniper, he's asking that anyway, so that's my answer to your question. You can have a bad king and a good king, so it's not set in stone. But Hamilton overall was a disaster. He invented the legal argument for implied powers of the Constitution during his debate with Jefferson over the constitutionality of National Bank. He was the first one to lay out the legal argument for how to go about perverting the commerce clause of the Constitution as Judge Napolitano talked about the other night. And so that's what I meant when I said that he spent the rest of his life after the Constitution was ratified, trying to undermine the Constitution by providing this. And one of his followers was John Marshall. He was the Chief Justice for 36 years and some of John Marshall's decisions were almost verbatim from Hamilton's speeches on how to pervert and destroy the true meaning of the commerce clause of the Constitution for exile, almost word for word. He was slavishly devoted to the ideology of Hamilton. He was the leader of his party, the sort of the federalist wing of American politics. And so I call him, in my book, I call him, there's a woman political scientist who wrote an article in the 1950s called the Rousseau of the Right. And that was Hamilton. And he's called Hamilton, the Rousseau of the Right. So if you're a fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophical father of communism, then maybe you should ask Michael Malice if he's also a fan of Rousseau because Hamilton was the Rousseau of the Right philosophically. Let's see, how about in the back? Yeah. You said that the Bank of the United States was modeled after the Bank of England. Is there any evidence that the Bank of the United States essentially was a continuation of the Bank of England? Oh, I don't think so. I've never went across it. I mean, these people, you know, Morris and these people, they were Americans. They knew it was a good scheme and they wanted it to be their scheme. And I don't know why they would hand it over to some British bankers and let them pocket the profits from their scheme. They wanted to pocket the profits from their scheme. They wanted British-style mercantiles and run by Americans, by them. And so there are all these theories out there about all kinds of theories about British bankers being sort of puppet masters of Robert Morris, but I've never seen any evidence of that. And I get emails all the time, especially when I used to work at a Catholic university, accusing me of being a tool of the Pope, just like Jefferson Davis was when he, when I write about Lincoln, because he sent his children to Catholic schools. So therefore, somehow this theory is out there that it was really the Pope who orchestrated the Civil War because the Catholic Church wanted to take over America. And then there's this other theory that the British bankers really orchestrated all of this and when it was them, they wanted to take over America. But they lost the revolution. If they're so powerful, why didn't they win the revolution than the British bankers? The man in the way back had his hand up first, I think, in the background. One of my heroes is Aaron Burr, he's the first creation of the best day of the new life. On that topic, do you have any taste on the treason trial of Aaron Burr and that un-fueled nexthose scandal? Do you know what was going on with that, or? I've never really booked up too much on Aaron Burr. There's a woman who writes blogs a lot for lurockwell.com, Becky Akers, who wrote a book on Aaron Burr. And she sort of, she defends Aaron Burr. So if you're not familiar with Becky Akers book on Aaron Burr, you should look it up if you're interested in this. But I suspect that he was scapegoated. Anybody who challenges Alexander Hamilton to a duel must be a good guy in my book. So yes, ma'am, the lady in the back. High-speed rail? Yeah. Well, the whole history of government railroads is pretty bleak, isn't it? Amtrak has never made a penny in profit. And so you could call it high-speed rail. It sounds high-tech and futuristic, but it's still gonna be run by government and government bureaucrats if it's a government program. So it's in the, and so in government, you don't have the free market feedback mechanism that rewards with profits, efficient behavior, and penalizes with losses, bad behavior. In fact, it's just the opposite. In any, in every government program, I used to call this De Lorenzo's first law of government. Failure is success. The worst you do at teaching the kids in school, the more money we give the public schools. The worse poverty becomes, the more money we give the poverty bureaucracy. And on and on and on. So the worse you do, the more money you get. It's just the opposite of the market. And the whole history of railroads in America has been like that, has been corrupt because people always spend other people's money less carefully than they spend their own money, don't they? And so you could call it high-speed rail, but we don't, we already have some of these. And it will be determined by politics, where the routes go and every aspect of planning is not determined by the economic bottom line, which is to say pleasing consumers. It'll be determined by political influences. And who knows where that will lead to? It's saying, we know it won't lead to efficiency, for that's sure. So there is no such thing, you know, the argument that the governments always make about efficiency as well, we're gonna make government more business-like. We're gonna hire some retired CEO to run the high-speed train or something like that. But then that begs the argument. If you think being business-like is such a good idea, why not privatize it and let a real business operate? You know, why are you playing business? It's kind of like the market socialists during Misi's time who wanted to play capitalism, who thought they could play capitalism. It didn't really work out too well for the Russians, did it? It didn't really succeed. So maybe one more question and our time is up. How about you? You had his hand up for about four since I came into the room, I think. Yeah. So I just wanna ask, for context first, is have you read the Poison's book, The Ethics of Money Production? Yeah, yeah. So my question is more about, in that book, he argued that low interest rates tend to lead to higher time preference behavior, which in turn also leads to the kind of state leadership and the state becoming a bigger part of people's lives and supporting bigger government policies. Would you say that that concept was probably Hamilton's main motivation for supporting the bank, saying as he constantly wanted to undermine that constitution? I don't think Hamilton was anywhere near that sophisticated in his economic understanding. As I said, he was an economic ignoramus. It really is remarkable that the historians will tell you that it was Jefferson who was the economic dummy and it was Hamilton. Jefferson translated the physiocrats into English. He translated the French physiocrats into English. If you walk into Monticello tomorrow, Thomas Jefferson's home, right by the front door, there's a big marble bust of Turgo whose name is on the wall over there. One of his names, the French Finance Minister. And so it's right over there somewhere, as I remember seeing it, he's pointing at it. Yeah, it's right in front of me, right there, ARJ Turgo. And so it was Jefferson who was very well-schooled in economics of his day, including Adam Smith. And it was Hamilton who was the big dummy. He read mercantilist pamphlets written by publicists for British slave plantation traders. And it said things like transportation cost is useless labor, the depths of his income. So I don't think, I don't think so. He just wanted government to be bigger and more activist. He disavowed Adam Smith's invisible hand theorem. He denigrated it, he sneered at it because he thought the economy had to be micromanaged by smart lawyers like himself. That's my opinion of Hamilton. That's the extent of why he was such a busy body. And that's why, and he was also a very Machiavellian. You know, when he nationalized the national debt, the debt for the war had been put up by the states. The states incurred all the war debt. In some states like Virginia had almost paid off all their debt from the war. Other states like Massachusetts had not paid hardly anything. And Hamilton orchestrated the nationalization of the war debt. And he let all the insiders in Congress know that these bonds that were selling for between two and 10% of par value would be purchased by the government at 100% par value. And so all the insiders, Congressman Robert Morris himself, Alexander Hamilton himself, went all over the country buying up all these bonds from war veterans at 2%, 5% of par value, and then cashed them in at 100% a few months later because for the students, you have to understand this is before the internet. So, you know, information didn't flow as quickly as it did now. And Robert Morris is said to have made the equivalent of I think it was $8 million in the deal. And Hamilton himself became rich also with this deal. And that's one of the reasons why Jefferson despised him so much. He called it, he was in favor of consolidation, meaning highly centralized state bottomed on corruption, based on corruption. And that's also why Hamilton wanted a central bank. He wanted a central bank to be able to use to buy political votes in the future because he understood this was a one-time deal. They're getting all these members of Congress, making them rich with the nationalization of the debt was a one-time deal, but they were going to retire and die. And so if you want to keep this engine of the statism going, you need a more permanent engine of statism and that would be the bank. And that was Hamilton's reasoning for being such a champion of the bank. I don't think he understood interest rates or economics at all. Time is up. Time is up.