 Thank you everyone for attending. So I understand that I'm the only thing standing in the way between you and dinner. So I promise this will only take about an hour and a half. Anyway, so I'm Patrick Newman. The title of my talk is A Rothbardian Analysis of the Constitutional Convention. This has been a project that I've been working on for a bit. I edited the fifth volume of Murray Rothbard's Conceived in Liberty as well as some other histories. So it's kind of given a good in-depth analysis, good in-depth perspective of the Constitutional Convention, as well as sort of the aftermath. All right, so what is this presentation about, and why should you care? So this relates to the Murray Rothbard's fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty, which came out late last year, as well as my forthcoming book, Liberty versus Power, a History of Cronism in the United States, 1607 to 1849. So sort of continuing the story that Murray Rothbard was talking about. So what I'll try and show is this is something that features a very large in Rothbard's analysis, as well as mine, is that sort of the US Constitution is a thoroughly crony document. So the first thing, what exactly do I mean by crony? So you think of why a legislation was passed. Was it passed in the public interest? I suppose some benevolent politicians, they're supporting some policy to mainly benefit everyone overall, or is it passed to some sort of special interests in that one group is trying to gain at the expense of the public. So they're trying to get some tax, discriminatory tax, some license, some regulation, et cetera, to sort of benefit themselves and screw their competitors at the same time. So this is what I mean by cronyism. And the Constitution is just constitutional drives in general throughout the United States, very important in crony analysis. So the US Constitution is a crony document. It's full of special privileges. And the way in which you understand this is you have to look at the motivation behind sort of the Constitutional Convention, what was established at the Constitutional Convention, as well as what happened after the Constitutional Convention. So you've got the before, the during, and the after. So the Federalists pushed for a Constitutional Convention in 1787 to secure privileges. Various interest groups were unsatisfied with the articles of confederation and how things were turning out. The Federalists succeeded at the Convention in getting what they wanted, or at least getting a government system that they could interpret in a certain way to get what they wanted. And then the Federalists passed special interest legislation in the early 1790s under the leadership of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was also at said Constitutional Convention. So something I'll see throughout this presentation is that there's really one man who, in many ways, is responsible for all three of these things, or at least look to benefit from all three of these things. And he's probably someone many of you haven't heard of. His name is Robert Morris. He was a very prominent financier during the Revolutionary War. He was at the Constitutional Convention. And he later served as a senator for Pennsylvania. He's a very rich man. Anyway, so there's many of special interest perspectives you can take on the Constitution, many perspectives that Rothbard takes as well, different examples. I only have so much time, so I'm just gonna concentrate on government debt, banking, tariffs, and various sorts of land policies that the Constitutional Convention, they try to iron out. And as well as what happened afterwards. So you're able to see, okay, what's the motivation? How did they actually accomplish this at the Constitutional Convention? And how did they try and capitalize on this after the fact? So first of all, before we go through this, so Rothbard didn't really write a whole lot on the Constitution. The only time he did in any sort of in-depth analysis was in a footnote to an article he wrote in the early 80s, sort of describing his views on the Constitution. They're very different than another view by many sort of held by some free market writers, free market thinkers, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tolick. This is the calculus of consent. It was very famous where they basically say that while governments can form, they're formed through voluntary process and through unanimity. And it's sort of unanimous because it's not really unanimous but it's relatively unanimous, which it's not unanimous then. But anyway, so they use this sort of as a template for the Constitution. Now to be fair, they're not saying that the Constitutional delegates actually behaved according to how they outline their theory but as good positivists they say they behaved as if they were following the theory. So anyway, take that for what it's worth. So this is Rothbard in the early 80s, the myth of neutral taxation. He says Buchanan and the public choice theorists argue that the all voluntarily forcing themselves process actually takes place at the basic quote, constitutional level. But again, there is no evidence for this whatsoever. Oh, I'm not sure why that paragraph got a little spaced out. If they have the American constitution in mind then they should realize that the constitution was put across against the wishes of the majority of the public and that the constitution makers were interested not in general rules for the benefit of all but in pushing through measures, protective tariffs, opening up of export markets, repayment of the public debt at far above market price, expanded bank credit for privileged groups, public works for one set of people at the expense of another. So sort of outlining this and this is something that he explains very in depth and conceived in liberty. This is really the only time in any significant fashion he spoke about the constitution before this and he's really going through how well it's in a sense is a crony document. You have the very special interest, they get together at the constitution convention, they have a big pow wow, right? They don't let anyone hear what they're gonna say, they shut the windows, et cetera. And then they devise all of these sorts of policies and they look forward to benefiting from. Okay, and that's exactly what happened. So we look at the constitution convention of 1787. During this time period, you can really split up the political spectrum into two groups, the anti-federalists and the federalists, okay? The anti-federalists refer a small government, a limited confederation, the federalists refer a strong national government. Now, if you know your political science and your history, that's actually, the anti-federalists really should have been called they were the federalists, okay? Because it was a balance of power between the central government and the states. The federalists should have been called the nationalists, but the federalists did so many times throughout history, they've seized the day and they've taken control of the name game. So you call yourself federalists, you know, that sounds great. And then you call your opponents anti-federalists, like no one wants to be anti, like then you're just negative, it's very pessimistic, it's not optimistic. But so there are very few anti-federalists who attended, most famously, Patrick Henry, declined to attend, he said that he smelt a rat and he was correct. So he's one of my favorite founding fathers, I swear it has nothing to do with the name similarity. But anyway, so very few anti-federalists attended and you had mostly hardcore federalists, so they brought out their big guns, they were related to the merchant prince, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, right? We'll talk a little bit more about him. Gouverneur Morris, no relationship with Robert Morris, they were linked business-wise, but they didn't actually have a family relationship in James Wilson of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton of New York, James Madison in George Washington of Virginia, in Charles Picney in Charles Cotesworth Picney of South Carolina, okay? These were the main states, the federalists were the strongest, et cetera. And we'll be talking more about these interesting characters in a little bit. Something that's important to note is that when it actually comes to the Constitutional Convention, something very important from the federalist perspective is to secure what I call the big three, sort of vague clauses, okay? Which they surprisingly get with mostly little debate, okay? This is the supremacy clause, this is the general welfare clause, and the necessary and proper clauses. Now, you can, as what happened later on in the 1790s, interpret these clauses very strictly, but how the federalists wanted them is they wanted to have sort of these all-present, powerful clauses where you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. And that's more or less what happened and what they were sort of arguing for, particularly Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who in many ways are really kind of like the true fathers of the Constitution in a sense, they just weren't as famous, sort of as James Madison. Anyway, so the main reason why you want these vague clauses instead of explicit enumeration is because the vague clauses will raise less controversy and you can always sort of, they can do the heavy lifting in the dirty work, kinda. When you have explicit enumeration saying what the government can do or cannot do, right, it's gonna raise a lot of opposition, particularly during ratification. So don't say anything about chartering monopolies or central banks, you'll just be able to argue it for later on with sort of these vague clauses, et cetera. So this is often what happens in modern-day politics as well. You kind of have the important stuff buried in footnotes that the important stuff is what allows you to open up Pandora's box and get whatever you want out of it, okay? So this is sort of very important. There was a lot of very severe debate. This is something that Rothbard also discusses at the Constitutional Convention. It didn't really have to do so much with the nature of government power. It just had to do with who would control that power. So it had to do with, you know, is the House going to get representation according to population or equal voting, et cetera, or are slaves going to be counted in the representation and so on? And it was eventually decided that the House would be based off of population, partially three-fifths of slaves. In the Senate, each state would get two votes, et cetera. And these were sort of the real controversies at the convention, okay? Anyway, so let's talk about the actual interests, what they were looking for and what they got out of the Constitution and then how they exploited that. So first came the debt speculators, okay? This was at least the most prominent group. So during the Revolutionary War, if you remember your American history, the federal and state governments, they didn't raise taxes to finance the war. Instead, they basically paid soldiers with debt securities, okay? And then, you know, these securities said, oh, well, we'll raise taxes for them in the future and so on. Soldiers that wanted to buy goods with them, they, you know, they wanted to buy goods, et cetera, stay alive and so on. They subsequently sold their securities for cash at highly depreciated rates, okay? Because people estimated the government was just going to default or repudiate on these securities. They weren't gonna be able to make their payments because the federal government didn't have the power to tax on the Articles Confederation and so on. And it just so happens that who was the person buying up most of this debt? Well, it just so happened to be the wealthy speculators affiliated with Robert Morris, who was also sort of very prominent in the war. So they were buying up all this debt, all right? Now, buying highly speculative debt in itself isn't crony, okay? If the debt is backed by payment of taxes in the future, that does make it crony. And if there's somehow you're able to get the constitution to turn that junk debt into grade A debt, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, you know, that's very crony then, okay? Because you're basically just having the taxpayer, you're offloading all of the risk onto the government. So Robert Morris was very big in trying to get the Articles Confederation to acquire a taxing power and assume all of the debts at face value, okay? The problem, the Articles Confederation, so just to sort of clarify, when I have AOC there, I'm referring to the Articles Confederation, okay? Not the other AOC. So obviously the AOC required an amendment for taxes, talking about the Articles Confederation, required an amendment for taxes and unanimity. In Rhode Island blocked the tariff of 1781. New York blocked the tariff of 1783, okay? So each of the state legislators had to ratify the proposed tax, and in each case they fell short. So you can't get any taxing power, you can't assume the debts, and you can't benefit the debt speculators, okay? Okay, so then you get the Constitution Convention to assume the debt, okay? So the first thing, very important, is that Congress requires a taxing power. Only a simple congressional majority is needed, okay? So you don't even need a super majority, so something like two-thirds, okay, of Congress. You just need a simple majority in both chambers. The state legislators are not involved at all, except to the extent that they, at least back then, they elected the senators, okay? And there's no unanimity required, okay? So just a simple majority, relatively easy to get through, and so on. The taxing power is also explicitly linked with the payment of the public debt, okay? So that kind of gives a good, you know, actually a bad omen of things to come. In Madison and Hamilton, insured the Constitution, assumed the confederation's debt. It doesn't say anything about, you know, what value, and then say nothing about the state debts to provoke less opposition during ratification, okay? So again, rather than explicitly say something, you just don't talk about it. If you just don't talk about it, then people won't talk about it, hopefully, and then it'll just be able to sort of sneak through, okay? So this is very important. The new government was going to assume the old debts of the confederation Congress, as well as the state governments during this time period. Okay. So then, you know, moving on, the next step is, well, the Constitution gets ratified in 1788. We elect George Washington as the first president. He gets sworn in early 1789. So what to do? It takes a little bit of time, but at the end of 1789, Alexander Hamilton finally jumps on board as Secretary of the Treasury. And in the early part of January 1790, he writes, he publishes the report relative to a provision for the support of public credit. And he says Congress should assume roughly $80 million of federal and state debts at face value. Okay, so just let's take all of the confederation debt, assume that at face value, okay? Doesn't matter if you bought at a highly depreciated rate, you'll get the full benefit. We'll take all of the state debts and we'll basically, we'll also fund those at face value. Okay. So the best analysis I've found of this is by this historian named Irving Brant in 1950, and he's talking about Hamilton's overarching motivation for doing this. And it was to basically bluntly stated, Hamilton's precept was, bind the rich to the government by self-interest, okay? So what is he trying to do? Well, he knows all of the securities are held in the hands of speculators. And what better way to enlist the speculators, enlist the rich into your new sort of government by giving them a nice payout, okay? So this is a very smart thing, a very shrewd thing to do on his behalf, okay? Make no mistake about it, he was a genius. He disagreed with all of his ideas, like I do, but he was extremely smart person. So then what you do, continuing this, is that so since 1789, Senator Robert Morris and other affiliated speculators sort of increasingly gobbled up the debt, including Assistant Secretary of the Treasury William Dure. Okay, so you have a guy, he's working in the treasury, he's like Hamilton's assistant and he's engaging in this speculation because he's expecting to benefit, all right? Now, according to various estimates, 80% of the federal debt was held by wealthy northern speculators. Just put some numbers, put some things in perspective. 78 individuals bought up 31% of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina's debt. Eight men bought up half of this amount, okay? Congress passed debt assumption in mid-1790 after this was occurring and all these men enjoyed a massive windfall gain, basically. Again, to put some numbers in perspective, by 1795, 5% of debt holders, so those of you who had securities holdings of $10,000 or more, right? Back then, that was a lot of money. That was before the Fed inflation, right? You own, they own 65% of the total debt, okay? Point, it's not a typo, 0.25% of debt holders, $100,000 or more, they own 30% of the debt, okay? So it was increased, it was basically extremely concentrated among a tight-knit oligarchy, okay? And then when you realize that how did the debt get funded, it was basically, it was funded through regressive tariffs in internal taxes on whiskey in particular. It basically acted, the debt assumption acted as a massive sort of sectional redistribution racket, right? Because your, one, these taxes fell mainly, particularly the whiskey tax fell mainly upon poor farmers in the West, all right? And so they were paying for, to fund the securities held by rich elites in the East, okay? This was a big problem. This is what a lot of people got upset about, particularly some farmers in Western Pennsylvania who raised the stir over the whiskey tax and George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had to go in there with the Calvary and scare them into paying the tax. So, you know, so that's, in this way basically, the debt interests were able to get what they wanted using the Constitution, okay? Next came the bankers, all right? So during the Revolutionary War at the behest of once again, financier Robert Morris, Congress chartered the Bank of North America in 1781, okay? The Bank of North America also acquired a Pennsylvania State Charter, okay? So something to briefly talk about because this is very important from the history of cronyism, as well as just legal history, is that when we're saying charter, we're referring to a corporate charter, a corporation. And then when we're saying corporation, we're not referring to the modern day corporation, okay? These corporations were similar, but they were basically, they had to get a government license in order to operate them. So in order to use the privilege of limited liability, which can be something that can be voluntarily agreed upon in the market, okay? Something that enormously reduces the risk of owning stock in a corporation, you had to basically go to the state legislature and you had to get a charter. You had to, in other words, you had to go to the state legislature, you had to bribe the state legislators and then you got your license, all right? Unfortunately, so Robert Moore's planned to have all this be a part of a giant, his new sort of elite government run by basically his himself, but it all fell apart once the Confederation was not able to get taxing power. And by 1783, the Bank of North America lost its federal charter and in 1785, Pennsylvania weakens its state charter. They say, hey, we're just not gonna keep giving you all these privileges regarding blocking out competition, how much money you can raise, certain other subsidies, et cetera. And the Pennsylvania state is also printing its own money, and this is acting as competition to the Bank of North America. So Robert Morris and his associates are not too happy about this, okay? So what do they do? Well, you get the Constitutional Convention to deliver various banking privileges. So the Constitutional Convention initially decided to explicitly empower Congress with the ability to print money, okay? And this power could be used to print money to give banks reserves that they could use to engage in credit expansion, finance wars, and so on. However, it struck it out. Now, you might think that this meant that the Constitution forbids chartering companies, well, at least according to Gouverneur Morris and James Madison, who are sort of the main architects of the Constitution. Well, now the Constitution just restricts printing to a, quote, responsible minister, in, quote, safe emissions, okay? So once again, you're getting rid of the explicit aspect, and well, you can use the General Welfare Clause and you can do it through there. That's what Gouverneur Morris said. It's like, well, you can just do it through that. Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris led the effort to get the Constitution to explicitly prohibit the states from printing money, because they didn't want that at all, okay? And this is very important of Pennsylvania's eight delegates, seven to own stock in the Bank of North America. They didn't want competition from Pennsylvania. So they basically said, oh no, we want to prevent Pennsylvania from being able to print money. And we want basically most of the money printing that come from privileged chartered banks. That's its monopolies, okay? So the Constitution said nothing about the federal government's power to print money. It was implied, but explicitly prohibited states from printing money, okay? Once again, the vague clauses can do the dirty work. At least this is the argument, is that you don't want to say anything about the federal government because once again you can argue it through the vague clauses, but you do explicitly say something about the state governments because you don't want them doing that, okay? Okay, yeah, James Madison at the convention also proposed giving Congress the explicit power to charter corporations and the convention shot it down. However, it's again the federalists, the arch federalists, such as James Wilson said, well, such ability, we don't need this because it's already included in the power to regulate trade. Why explicitly say something? It's gonna raise a lot of controversy, then it's gonna think that, oh, if we're explicitly saying some things, we won't be able to do other things, et cetera. And Morris thought that the general welfare clause authorized Congress to quote grant exclusive privileges to trading companies. So once again, the big three you can do the dirty work. This is sort of the idea, all right? So constitution, you kind of have that thing built in an embryo about the bank, it's in there, we'll be able to do it. We get Congress to charter a bank. Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, he's such a diligent worker, about a year after he writes his debt funding thing, well then he writes a report on a national bank later in 1790. It's referred to a Senate committee. Who's on the Senate committee? Well, Senator Robert Morris is on the committee and the other three out of five members, including Morris, they own stock in state banks. So will this committee be favorable to a central bank? Yes, it was. And in February 1791, after much debate, Congress charters the Bank of the United States. Now something very interesting about this, if you know the Bank of Controversy, you'll know that there was a debate between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and George Washington and Hamilton and George Washington was the president. He kind of didn't know what to do. He was gonna lean towards his fellow Virginians and then he sided with Hamilton. One of the things that people don't talk about is that at the same time, the real reason actually why Washington signed the bill is because at the same time, he was given authority to choose where the capital is gonna be. The capital was currently, it was not, DC was not created, okay? And he had the ability to put it somewhere in Virginia and he was given a little small section. Now he wanted to maybe move the capital right outside of that small section that Congress allotted because it was next to a bunch of his property, right? And it would increase the value of his property and he wasn't able to do that if he was gonna veto the bill. So what happened is he signed the bill, Congress amended the act, allowed him to move the basically the capital just a little bit closer to his land. It's a little cushion, you know, a little sweetener for himself. And there that's how we get the bank. Bear in mind Washington and Morris were actually very close, Robert Morris. So anyway, Congress charters the Bank of the United States. Importantly, it's got a 20 year monopoly over interstate banking. It's Philadelphia based. Okay, the main office is in Philadelphia. It can establish branches across the country, but Congress isn't gonna chart or another bank with interstate branching. So it's basically the only game in town in that regard. It's a huge monopoly. It's got a $10 million capitalization. The federal government owns 20% of this. It chooses some of its directors. And private ownership can be purchased with specie or government debt. That other requirement, you know, the other point there about purchasing stock with government debt, that also is going to increase the price of the government debt held by the debt speculators. There's just another little sweetener, right? To benefit the debt speculators. And also the treasury stores deposits at the bank. It keeps its money at the bank. This is a massive subsidy, right? Because the bank now has a massive amount of revenue or, you know, you can use to engage in loans and credit expansion and all that stuff. Okay. All right, let's look more at this bank. 50% of congressmen who voted for the bank bill purchased stock in the institution. I don't know why. Ownership was concentrated in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Charleston. The government directors are mostly associated with Senator Robert Morris. Thomas Willing, Morris's business associate and the former president of the Bank of North America becomes the president of the Bank of the United States. Just it's a cozy little connection. Like, yeah, again, this is very, it's very linked. This, I can't emphasize this enough, this Robert Morris individual, he's got his hand in everything, right? This, and then that should be actually apologized. The first bank of the United States, I gave a presentation earlier in the day on the second bank, the first bank of the United States lends mainly to the federal government into large federal, federalist businesses, land speculators, debt speculators, merchants, et cetera. So you're able to create an institution with the privilege to print money and you're going to funnel it into your particular businesses. So those connected with the bank and so on in the federalist party. So this is something very prominent. It's not unusual for, at least for the federalists to be pushing for this through the bank. They did the same thing where they intentionally only promoted appointed their men to run the government and not the opposition. The anti-federalist opposition, at least early on. Okay, so we've got the bank now. Then came the manufacturers. So we go back to the Constitutional Convention. So under the Articles of Confederation, northern manufacturers could not secure high interstate tariffs. So New Jersey placing a tariff on goods from New York or New York placing a goods on, tariff on goods from New Jersey, et cetera. And why weren't they able to? Well, one, the south supported low tariffs. They didn't really want to develop their manufacturers. They were primarily agricultural. So that was immediately undercutting because importers would buy goods through the south instead of through the northern states. And there was also interstate competition. If one state has high tariffs, then the other states are going to undercut them because they're going to try and get more of the revenue. This is why cartels don't work. It's very similar with interstate competition, okay? Though it's not certainly as good as the free market. It's close enough. In interstate tariffs actually were just around 5%. Sometimes they were larger or they were stated to be larger, but this was before you had things like smuggling or sort of various rebates or other sort of things that cut exemptions that sort of cut the tariffs lower to about 5%. Not terrible. A lot of people would always make the argument, oh, New York was somehow running like its own. The mafia had already controlled New York at that point and they had very high tariffs hurting the nearby states. In reality, actually, New York had very similar tariffs. The fact is that New York was controlled by anti-federalists, particularly George Clinton, so no relation. And the fact that nearby states like Connecticut and New Jersey that were griping about this, they didn't have any major city to import goods from. And nothing's changed from the 1780s to now. Like the main cities in Connecticut and New Jersey come nowhere close to New York City, okay? So in other words, they were just upset mainly about the comparative advantage New York had. They also had no success on the federal level securing a tariff. So recall the failed tariffs of 1781 and 1783. And these tariffs themselves weren't large. They were around like 5%, but they failed. Again, remember always the opening wedge, right? You always start off low. You say you're gonna institute a wealth tax of 1% on the richest people. You say you're gonna institute an income tax of 1% on the richest people. Give it a couple of years. The net spreads to everyone, but you always gotta get your foot in the door first. Northern merchants experienced similar difficulties with navigation acts. So these various restrictions benefiting American ships as opposed to British ships, et cetera. That's a whole separate story. You can literally go to the fascinating story of merchants pushing for navigation acts and subsidies to beef up the Navy to allow them to sort of conquer the world's commerce. But that's a presentation for another day, I guess. So anyway, so you got the problem. What's the Constitution gonna do? Well, the convention outlawed interstate tariffs. Sorry, we don't want that competition. We just want the federal government to enact a large tariff wall. And you require only a simple congressional majority, 51% for tariffs. Sorry, just so we were talking about the taxing power. This is a very frank statement. Rothbard emphasizes in his Inconceiving Liberty by Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts. And he says, justifying this, simple majority says, if the government is to be so fettered as to be unable to relieve the Eastern states, what motive can they have to join it? In other words, the only reason the Eastern states, i.e. the Northern states, are going to join the government as if we can raise tariffs. You know, these are one of the main reasons. Some Southern delegates wanted a supermajority, two thirds for tariffs and navigation acts. So this included some Southern Federalists as well as some Southern Anti-Federalists such as the great George Mason. But the Northern delegates sort of won over enough Southerners, particularly the Southern Federalists by sanctioning the slave trade until 1808, particularly some of the delegates in South Carolina. South Carolina throughout the 1790s, so this whole time period was a very big, sort of strong Federalist bastion, you could say. Anyway, so sort of moving on, then we would get Congress to pass tariffs. So Congressman Madison pushes for the Tariff Act of July 1789, basically the first act that the government passed is to get revenue, right? It's all about the money. Is the North wanted high tariffs, the South wanted low tariffs? Madison sides with the North because he says, well, I wanna bind these interests to the government, so I'm gonna push for a large, or at least I'm gonna push for a higher tariffs, right? There's no recorded vote of this, but it's most likely a simple majority in that it wasn't overwhelming. And it was about 12.5% average tariff rate. Okay, let's think about this for a second. All right, so it was about 5% before. All right, it was about 12.5% after, at least between the United States in particularly Great Britain or main trading partner. And tariffs continued to climb. So as Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton's prodding later on, federalists raised tariffs again in 1792 under the justification of, well, we're fighting people on the frontier and we're going to have to raise tariffs, et cetera. By 1800 rates are around 30%, okay? And then they would later climb after that, particularly during the War of 1812, benefiting these large manufacturers. But anyway, so you've got in a sense, the opening wedge to protective tariffs, sort of to protect the manufacturers at the same time as hurting the consumer, okay? All right, one of my most fascinating, what I find most fascinating, doesn't really get spoken about a whole lot, is the land speculators, right? Because we can't forget the land speculators, okay? So land speculators, what they would do back in the day, this is something that isn't always understood too much now because we live in a world where most land is basically owned by someone, or at least it says it's owned by someone, the government, individuals, et cetera, but back in the day, right? You know, the United States is just on the eastern side of the North American continent. You had a lot of land speculation, a lot of land was unowned, et cetera. And so there's two ways Rothbard says and conceives the liberty of owning land, or at least saying you own land. The first is that you actually own the land through homesteading, to mixing your labor and appropriating the land. This is the natural sort of rights perspective of ownership, okay, is the Lockean perspective. Or you can have, you just have the government says, yeah, I own that land over there, right? They don't really do anything. They just sort of plant the flag and they say, well, we're going to take all of this land, okay? Just like the original Virginia colony, King James said they owned the land from sea to sea, right, which literally would mean from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's just, it's all theirs. The king has willed it, okay? Now what they would do is they would acquire grants of unappropriated land from the state governments, at least in the 1780s. And then they would turn around and sell to settlers out of profit, okay? And this would be sort of a crony profit because they didn't actually really justly own the land to begin with, okay? And then they got sold to the people who would appropriate it and so on. So again, they would have massive tracts of land and then they would just basically built the public by basically selling it at artificially high prices. Now one thing speculators are worried about is they're worried about state governments who would grant these massive land disbursements and then later on an opposition legislature would come in and they'd say, hey, wait a second, this is totally ridiculous. No, we're going to rescind this grant, okay? They didn't want that, okay? Similar to sort of Pennsylvania's weakening of the Bank of North America's charter. So you gotta stop that. You get the Constitution Convention to protect land grants. So James Wilson, he's an attorney for Robert Morris, who's also a land speculator. And James Madison secure the contract clause in the Constitution and they wanted to prevent state legislatures from interfering with speculative land grants, particularly James Wilson, right? He's a lawyer for a land speculator and he wants to prevent people from rescinding the land grants. You're like, oh, okay. There's nothing fishy going on there. So they get this, so this contract clause can be interpreted from our perspective as sort of the later anti-Federalist Republican interpretations say the government can't interfere with private contracts. You know, that's great. A main motivation was to protect crony contracts, was to prevent the governments from actually sort of weakening those private, or excuse me, those government subsidized grants you could say, okay? This is very important. It's also very important to everyone remember James Wilson, all right? And Robert Morris. Is then you get the state legislatures to dole out land grants under the Constitution. I'm sure most people haven't heard of Yazoo or the Yazoo lands, okay? But you might have heard of Alabama and the Mississippi. Okay, back in the day, Georgia owned Alabama and Mississippi or the land that became Alabama and Mississippi, okay? And in 1794, the Yazoo land sort of encompassed a large part of this. You can just kind of think of modern day Alabama and Mississippi. And in 1794, four land speculator companies bribed the Georgia legislature into selling 35 million acres of land, okay? It's a lot for a paltry $500,000. It's like 1.5 cents an acre, okay? That's bargain, okay? Just, oh yeah, here you go. Like build your own kingdom, you know, and you'll be able to sell it and basically really screw all the farmers and everyone else who's gonna move in those areas and so on. Senator Robert Morris in Federalist Supreme Court Justice, yes, he got elevated to the Supreme Court. They're involved in the land speculation, okay? So let's think about that for a second. In many of the land companies, they quickly sold their old gotten gains. For example, the Mississippi company sold part of the land for part of its land holdings for over a million dollars. Basically, they think of 1.1 million dollars. The original cost they paid for this was less than $200,000, okay? It's a huge turnaround, okay? Now, when Georgia, the Georgians, the people of Georgia, they find out about this sort of ridiculous proposal that actually happened. They're furious. They throw out the state congressmen in later elections. In the new legislature in 1798, repeals the land grants, okay? So saying, yeah, everything we did last legislative, it's totally ridiculous. No, you don't own the land, et cetera. So what do the land speculators do? Well, one thing they do is they turn to their great federalist father. They turn to Alexander Hamilton. They say, what do we do? And he says, well, if you take this court to the Supreme Court, if you take this case to the Supreme Court, excuse me, well, they're gonna protect land grants using the contract clause, okay? Just like what lawyer and eventual Supreme Court justice James Wilson intended, okay? Now, you might think that James Wilson would actually be the one overseeing this case. However, in a sense of poetic justice, the panic of 1797 caused by the first bank of the United States credit expansion, it really just crushes Morrison Wilson, okay? They have to spend some time in debtor's prison, et cetera, and they just sort of become non-entities. However, the land speculators, they're still looking to benefit. Eventually, the case goes to John Marshall, the John Marshall Court, right? Who's a Virginia land speculator. He's also affiliated with Robert Morris. His younger brother James married Robert Morris' daughter, okay? Like, this guy's everywhere Robert Morris. And he ruled in favor of a partial bailout to the Yazoo claimants in 1810 in this famous court case, Fletcher v. Peck. Now, the corrupt Marshall, and I'm not exaggerating, he also wanted to use this case to protect his own pocket because he himself was involved in various land speculations and though he later sold them, et cetera, there's a lot of things tied up in the court case as well as that did the Marshalls who speculated with Morris own land in Virginia and that was decided in 1813 and in 1816 by the Supreme Court as well. Now, Marshall was good enough, he excused himself from those court cases, but Joseph's story basically delivered, who also worked for land speculator interests, basically delivered the ruling. Okay, so we've got that. So a great quote to sort of summarize what the federalists were trying to do at the Constitution Convention with the Constitution and in the early 1790s is by Curtis Nettles. So the best histories are the old histories. And he's speaking about this federalist program and he says the federalist program did not give birth to many large new fortunes. Its principal beneficiaries were men of substance who had become affluent before 1789. Their enlarged wealth enhanced their influence in government and society and pointed to an age of big business in which captains of finance would occupy the seats of the mighty. Okay, they were trying to basically create a government ruled by the wealthy elites. Okay, this is a very succinct way of describing that. Okay, all right. So first you get the convention. Okay, then when you get the convention, then you get the constitution. Then when you get the constitution, then you get the special privileges. Okay, so that's basically what I said there in 1787. Federalists push for a constitution convention to secure privileges. They secure the privileges in the US Constitution. Then they get Congress to enact said privileges using the US Constitution and you should read my book when it comes out where I talk about the stuff in more depth. All right, thank you very much. Thank you.