 Overall, the early years of the Hamiltonian era were a victory for Robert Morris. With the libertarian anti-Federalists out of the government, power-hungry Federalists had nothing standing in their way. Those are the words of our friend Patrick Newman. Here is another episode of the Liberty vs. Power podcast diving into cronyism, Liberty vs. Power in America 1607 to 1849. So we are entering now the Hamiltonian era. And really, even though this is the Washington administration, obviously the role of Hamilton, not only as the Secretary of Treasury, the leader of the Federalist Party, former chief of staff to General Washington during the revolution, his outsized influence of these early years and intellectually defining this political moment, I think, is something it's difficult to overstate. Patrick, can you think of another figure kind of with this so much singular influence on, not only just this being the first presidency of the constitutional order, but just getting like the outsized influence he has on setting the entire agenda of this governing state like this? It's very hard to find a figure in American politics who exerts that much influence, especially one that isn't actually a president. I mean, earlier in my book, I talked about how Congressman James Madison was sort of the first informal prime minister, and then Alexander Hamilton really took up that mantle and really accentuated it. I mean, he truly dominated policy like none other. So it's a bit hard. You could think of some subsequent presidents or maybe some officials, but no, not really. It really was Hamilton, given that it was the beginning of the government, given that the finances and monetary policy, et cetera, were some of the most important functions of government, so to speak, from the federalist perspective, Hamilton really dominated it. He was very smart. He was very energetic. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew what he wanted. So it's no surprise that he really, in many ways, he controlled this decade, and that's why I call it the Hamiltonian era. I know myself. When I first read the Ron Chernoff biography of Hamilton, then inspired the musical, I mean, that was the book that really got me interested in economics and really diving deeper because there is an incredible story behind Hamilton, and there was a genuine talent there. And I think all that has played into the influence that he continues to have, particularly now, I mean, the immigration aspect is obviously something that's been highly exploited by the Broadway aspect of it, but it's just interesting that even now, he's a figure that continues to stand out. But also I think what's interesting, though, is him as an intellectual influence on early America, kind of similar to some of the dynamics we're talking about, this tension between the old order of Europe and the new world. Here you have, in Hamilton, someone who is not influenced really, who is familiar with but not a product of Adam Smith's Wealth and Nations or Kantian or any of these other proto-libertarian, proto-Austrian economic thinkers that instead he comes from a very much influenced by the old European schools of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the mercantilists of that era. Can you touch on that a bit, just him really as a continuation of old era economic policies? Yeah. So that's a fascinating aspect of Hamilton's thought, and more broadly speaking, just economic thought in general during this time. So just through a little bit of a recap, I mentioned that during the, we discussed earlier the colonial era was dominated by the economic system known as mercantilism, which is when basically the government favors select businesses and other groups in order to achieve its various economic policies to increase the power of the government, to increase the wealth of the nation, of course always at the expense of other nations, right? So that's how the dominating, dominant economic philosophy argued for economic prosperity. The government will make one country the prosperous at the expense of other countries. It's sort of a kill or be killed mentality. Okay. So then beginning with the Enlightenment, you think of John Locke and then sort of moving further and further, people started to criticize this mercantilist system more broadly just kind of libertarian, you know, just general thrust economics was important, but there was no systematic criticism of mercantilist philosophy or mercantilist economics really until Adam Smith's an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, which came out in 1776. This influenced many of the American founders, particularly Jefferson. He really enjoyed the book. He thought it was a great book on political economy. If not the best, believe he said this in 1790, Hamilton was different. He didn't really find Adam Smith's prescription for economic growth, basically hands off, just develop the proper institutions that protect private property. As Smith once said in his lecture notes, peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice. That's all you need. If Smith championed the invisible hand, Hamilton championed what I call the visible hand, which is basically you get the government to intervene to stimulate various industries because that's how you make those industries great. So Hamilton thought the way you develop manufacturing in the United States is you have the government subsidize it. Okay, you don't just let the market decide to develop manufacturing when it wants to. So Hamilton's policies in many ways, everything from the debt assumption to the bank to the society for establishing useful manufacturers and all sorts of other stuff, larger military etc. So it really is the United States, it's really American mercantilism on a national scale instead of just individual colonies or independent states. So Hamilton should be understood as a thoroughgoing mercantilist. And I think it kind of goes to, you know, this kind of, I think plays out through a lot of Hamilton's thought is that he's so fixated on trying to recapture the greatness that he can see right now in the old England and rather than, you know, kind of taking a leap on these sort of new ideas like the other, the wealth of nations sort of inspired work. One of the things I was disappointed in, they have Jefferson's library at the Library of Congress. And I went through trying to see if there's anything from Cantillon that was in there as kind of feeding that Rothbardian sort of view there on the better proto-Australia. Unfortunately, I could not find anything there. But just as a, even in mainstream economics, I'm curious, how is Colbert viewed generally? Because I know that's one thing that is interesting is that, you know, there is a big push right now to kind of, you know, hold up Hamilton as a sort of, you know, great engine of economic growth in America, right? A lot of it comes from modern day defenses of tariffs and things like that. And yet, if you look at someone like Colbert and kind of the consequences of that policy from Supermoral Lens, you know, 100 years later, after the Sun King, we get, you know, the French Revolution. In fact, you know, it's fueled in many ways by debts and taxes and corporate privileges and all these sort of things that are very Hamiltonian in nature, right? So how is Colbert viewed even kind of in the mainstream in terms of as an economic thinker? Is this an example? Well, is he kind of celebrated because he's a good kind of propaganda following in history because he was a very useful tool for a very, you know, great man by some, you know, historical measures, you know, within, you know, Louis XIV? Or is he kind of recognized as being, you know, that policies that he implemented were not good longstanding for France? Also, I think his reputation is really intertwined with the current reputation of mercantilism, right? Which, in many ways, is somewhat making a comeback so that the actual name mercantilism or mercantilism, however, you know, you pronounce it, people go back and forth, etc., is sort of, it's somewhat disparate. Before anything of Rothbard and Mises, how they refer to it, it's, oh, the government is privileging select businesses at the expense of others to increase its own power. Most mainstream economic historians or historians of economic thought are going to couch it and describe it in some other different language. Oh, it's using government policy to improve certain sectors of the economy. They will criticize the zero-sum fallacies of mercantilism, arguing that when one party gains, it's always at the expense of someone else. But they will actually say that, well, some of the policies and, you know, you could use tariffs to accomplish certain objectives or subsidies and etc., so those are actually pretty good. You know, of course, done within the framework of a democratic, you know, government and making sure elites don't take control, and as long as we get the right experts in charge, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, we can really do all that. So his reputation is sort of, well, it's actually, you know, he did improve or arguing that, well, you needed regulation, quality standards, or he was trying to stimulate trade and stimulate the industry of France is, you know, the policies failed not because of the policies, but because France was simply, there's too much of a monarchy, couldn't get the industry off the ground, there was various other issues, so on and so forth. So Colbert is not disparaged as much as he might have been in the past, and this is similar to the fact that, you know, nowadays the American Revolution is criticized as being some secretive plot by white supremacists to break away from Great Britain. So it's like, well, you know, everything that was bad back in the day is now good, then you know, clearly Colbert is, you know, seen as, you know, sort of a good guy, and this is especially true because Colbert's greatest quote, in my opinion, is something along the lines of the art of taxation consistent, so plucking the goose as to obtain the most amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing. And you think about it, and that's actually a brilliant quote because that really does describe tax policy, and I'm sure most politicians would agree with it because they say, yeah, our goal is to try and raise taxes as high as possible without getting the public, you know, go grab their pitchforks, right? So his reputation, I think, is protected upon intended because of this general infatuation with government intervention and instead of the free market. Of course, that sort of economic philosophy lends itself to the social control being the highest art of statecraft. And I think if we look into the communist China and a few other, you've increased in the US as well, the way that the financial system can be penalized against political dissidents, I think there's a lot to be said that we are continuing on that legacy. But going back to Hamilton himself, though, you know, kind of one of the kind of simplification of the ideology driving the times is to bind the rich to the government by self-interest, as well as at times enriching those within his own orbit. There's a very early corruption scandal with William Doerr, but also just kind of this larger network that he has with, you know, being close with our good friend, Robert Morris himself, his father in law, Philip Schuyler, who was a very prominent leader in New York. These are names that we're going to kind of continue seeing pop up throughout this episode because it's interesting how so much of these policies that Hamilton pushes ends up enriching those immediately around him. That Doerr might be the most vulgar example of those. Can you just touch a little bit about the kind of the early corruption scandal of the Hamiltonian administration? Yeah, so the early corruption scandals of this may come as a shock to some of our viewers, but, you know, whenever there's a huge increase in the power of government, some corruption scandals may inevitably follow, right? But the big corruption scandal. So you think about Alexander Hamilton. So he becomes Secretary of the Treasury basically and for all intents and purposes, late 1789, early 1790. The James Madison as a congressman has been busy trying to get sort of the basic nationalist infrastructure of the new constitution off the ground, get the government up and running with funding and everything. And Hamilton has all these plans. He has this plan for assuming the state debts and the old debts of the Confederation Congress at par, benefiting a bunch of speculators, creating a new national bank, implementing tariffs and bounties or subsidies and so on. So initially, the big corruption issue sort of centered around the fact that Hamilton had this new report, so a report on the public debt. And he said, look, we're going to assume all the old debts at par. So what that means is at par means at face value. So if the government promised to pay people $1,000 in five years, then that's what they would do. Since the Revolutionary War and during the 1780s, the debts of the various governments, state and federal, had been more or less kind of depreciating because people didn't assume that they would be funded at par. So this is governments were defaulting or they were downsizing the debt. Many of the southern states, with the important exception of South Carolina, had begun to pay off their debts and so on. And the existing securities that were on the market were basically picked up by speculators, right? So these are speculators who are assuming a very high default risk. This is no different than someone nowadays. They're buying debt from, let's just say, Puerto Rico or something with the expectation that if Puerto Rico were to become a state in the union, then the federal government would basically bail out the speculators and they would pay it at par, right? So if you bought this debt, you could receive a very large windfall gain. Now that gain is basically discounted due to the fact that there's a high default risk, but all of these speculators, such as Robert Morris, Philip Schuyler, William Dure, et cetera, they knew that either the government was going to basically fund the debt at par or they were pushing for the government to actually do this. So this is a clear instance of cronyism because you have these government securities and you're pushing for the government to raise taxes on the rest of the public so you yourself can benefit. And this is exactly what happened once Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury, once people knew he was working on a report, when he started to initially announce the report, all of these speculators continued to gobble up this debt with the expectation that they knew the government was going to bail them out, okay? And people associated with Hamilton were not free from this, although Hamilton himself, at least as far as our records show, did not engage in this type of cronyism to enrich himself. He knew Robert Morris had done this and it would make it look really bad and sort of thwart his own plans. He basically allowed his fellow supporters, et cetera, to profit, which would of course help himself in promoting his own aspirations in the government, his success as the Secretary of the Treasury, so on and so forth. And I think Durer, if I'm staying correct, was he was actually serving in the Treasury Department himself, right? Skyler and others, like they're kind of outsiders, but like he was in the office and so being able to purchase off of this insight information and he had this interesting race of knowledge, right, within the confines of 1790s America, right, word doesn't get out there as fast as it is on Twitter. Just kind of an interesting aspect of, again, I think you called this the second crud bargain this is dealing here. And I think one of the things that's interesting is, you know, this brings back in Mr. James Madison to the stage. And what's interesting is that the split, as you illustrated, is, you know, this is when it comes, but it's not because Madison has some sort of epiphany towards liberal thought per se. But instead, it recognizes that it's more of a sectional issue and he's defensive of Virginia supremacy at, you know, at the expense of, say, New York interests, right? That's kind of what's guiding a lot of this pushback more than, say, you know, this this outspring of old Republican virtue. Yeah. So James Madison, I've discussed this before. I'm not a fan of James Madison. I he's not farewell in my book. So for a big James Madison fans, that's, that's, I guess, that's, that's, that's the way the cookie crumbles. He, I think the most accurate way of looking at him, interpreting his actions is he was an opportunist. He was a nationalist the whole way, but he knew how to, you know, he knew how to talk the talk, so to speak. So James Madison, he actually even recommended Hamilton to be Secretary of the Treasury. Like he, he was pro Hamilton. He was, he was big on, you know, the basic outlines of some of Hamilton's policies, et cetera. But once Hamilton starts pushing for the debt assumption, Madison is against it, why? Because Virginia had paid off its debts. He didn't want Virginia to lose out on this. Why should we bail out these other states by assuming their debts? If Virginia isn't actually benefiting from this and Madison had also alienated a lot of people in Virginia by, you know, pushing for the weak bill of rights and various other measures in 1789. And this was hurting him. And he barely won. He was, he was prevented from becoming a senator. He kind of won somewhat by the skin of his teeth to be a congressman, despite the, the, the efforts of Patrick Henry. So, you know, his reelection was coming up soon. So he had to take some sort of pro, he had to take some pro Virginia stances. And this is the beginning, this debt assumption issue is the beginning of this rift, this otherwise relatively amicable agreeing on the broad points between Hamilton and Madison, right? So Madison kind of takes this 10, 10 plus year detour is sort of being a proponent of limited government. He's always more interventionist than Tom, Thomas Jefferson is and others, but this is kind of the beginning of Madison's sort of second phase. And it really comes down to the fact that Hamilton was looking to find it, benefit the North and Madison wanted to benefit Virginia. Yes. No, the Madison's first role might come back in later, later chapters, we shall see. Um, but what was interesting now with this battle, though, is that, you know, even Jefferson, you really doesn't stand up to the plate the way, you know, you have that this, this ultimate, I think it's even to play demonstrated in the Hamilton musical, right? You know, this, this, this meeting behind the scenes where it's Jefferson doing the hosting and, you know, this is kind of where, you know, raw politics and its truest form creates the stage for debt assumption. Um, yet here you do have your, your favorite Virginian, I believe, right? Patrick Henry does take the stand, um, and actually tries to nullify this in 1790s, uh, trying to use the state legislatures as a, as a means to stopping, uh, this, this, you know, debt move. Mm hmm. Yeah. So this is basically the, the, the whole issue was Madison was pushing for a very complicated system of discrimination that realistically would have been very hard to actually implement, uh, given, you know, technology and, and everything where certain, uh, holders of government securities would be, uh, benefited more or less depending on when they purchased the security. I mean, that information is very hard to get Hamilton wanted, you know, you gotta, you gotta assume everything to everyone at, uh, at par. Of course, this is benefiting speculators and he wanted to bind the rich to the government because the rich would be the most likely to keep funding the government. This wasn't going anywhere in Congress. So it seemed like all hope was lost, but lo and behold, Thomas Jefferson, uh, arrives. He's the chosen secretary of state. He's coming back from France. He was not around during the constitutional convention. Uh, very unfortunate in my opinion. And Thomas Jefferson earlier on, he expressed support for downsizing the federal debt in terms of defaulting on it. Uh, various parts of the federal, uh, various parts of, of the, uh, of the, uh, the governments, various governments, debts, and this could have been, uh, you know, potential layout. Jefferson, he, this could have been a great way if he really wanted to fight for that. He could have sided with anti-federalists who are very upset at that, but that would have really thrown the entire new government into chaos and ended it then and there. Of course, I think that would be a great idea. Most historians are like, you know, they, they view this as an absolute calamity. Um, but again, that's, that's, that's just, that's my perspective, I guess. And so, uh, Jefferson and, and what I call the second corrupt bargain, he basically has Hamilton and Madison over for dinner. Uh, I sort of imagine it is, is, is like a secret meeting. It's, you know, some drinks and all of that. They're discussing things like mob bosses. And basically what happens is, uh, Jefferson and Madison, they agree to, uh, all right, they'll have the government, they'll assume all the debts at par. Virginia actually gets reimbursed a bit. So Virginia, uh, ends up benefiting, which makes them happy. And Hamilton says, okay, I've got that along, you know, tying in with another controversy at the time. He says, all right, I'll, we'll have the capital. I'll only be in Philadelphia temporarily, which the capital was currently in Philadelphia. Says, all right, we'll allow George Washington through what's known as the residence act to place it along some pre-determined boundaries along the Potomac River, right? So this area near Maryland in, in, in Virginia. And so they shake hands. And so the, uh, the, the, the credit of the government is restored. Uh, at least there's a huge benefit to various speculators, which you can go into really, uh, a very regressive system made a lot of people very wealthy and seems like business as usual. But fortunately, Patrick Henry, who is my favorite founding father and, uh, I just think he's great. He's very against this. He's sort of brooding in Virginia. He's very upset because the Constitution got ratified. He said all these problems were going to happen. And guess what? These problems are starting to happen. So he's, he's, he's, I describe him as apoplectic. I think he's just, he's, I rate, he's furious at this. He's like, why didn't, why didn't you listen to me? And through what's known as the, uh, the various resolutions in the Virginia legislature, he, they basically come very close to saying that, well, this debt is, is not valid. Uh, the, this assumption, it's, it's unconstitutional, it's going, uh, it's benefiting speculators, it's hurting Virginia, so on and so forth. And it comes very close to what we would call nullification, but that really doesn't go all the way, uh, the, the hardcore elements of that get struck out in the actual, uh, resolutions of Virginia. And what really kind of happens is there's just more of, uh, uh, you know, a, a dust up or a ruffling of the feathers, so to speak. But it was important enough because it shows Henry was going to fight this corruption of power. That's, it's seemingly taking control of Jefferson, someone who he had, uh, not liked for a long time, and it seemed like, in his opinion, now for good reason. And, um, that former anti-Federalists were starting to strategically interpret the Constitution to make it a limited government document, but the whole debt controversy is very important. It really is, uh, one of the first acts of the government, of course, is one of its major instances of cronyism. Well, as, as you say in the book, it becomes clear that Hamilton's funding program was a massive redistribution racket that siphon taxpayer money to the rich, or more specifically the gains flow to the old rich. And, and even note, uh, the, the fortunes of these families, you know, like Morris, like Dewar, like Skyler and the like, they exploded the 60 million dollars, and we're talking this massive redistribution of wealth that that's measurable here. Um, and I think there's a scale of that. It is so easy to, to overlook. I mean, even Washington benefited from it. Um, you mentioned briefly that, uh, uh, you know, Jefferson and Henry didn't get along. I said something that kind of has, you know, further ramifications. Do we know kind of what the cause of that split is there, even amongst, you know, otherwise ideological allies? Yeah. So, um, this happened in the, in the Revolutionary War. I sort of allude to it in my book. This is something maybe could have, you know, if I had more space, I would have spent a little bit more time on basically, like in large part, it had to deal with, um, their view of executive power, right? So in terms of either the, the, the, the basically the, the governor of Virginia. So when the, uh, Virginia constitution was being devised after their Declaration of Independence or around it, uh, when various, you know, we knew we were going to secede, et cetera, various, uh, colonies or what became states were devising whole new systems of government, right? Uh, we're going to now be a democratically elected government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, um, Henry was basically in favor of a more vigorous executive, uh, Jefferson, uh, less. And this is, in a sense, very ironic because it sort of deals with, uh, future issues regarding the Jacksonians and the nature of executive power. And so this is why I was sort of chuckling at this when, when, when I read this and, um, because it really, Jefferson, even during the bank controversy, he always thought Congress was supreme. Okay. And this is why he said to Washington that, well, at the same time, uh, you know, if Congress passed it, then, you know, you just got to go with that. Uh, Henry, though we don't, I don't believe we specifically know what he would have thought would have been much more of a vigorous executive, uh, potentially allowing for the veto to take on a non-constitutional role, et cetera, much like Andrew Jackson used it. That was really the, the, that root of the disagreement. And then there were some controversies over war policies while they were governors, et cetera. And that, that, that was just it where what they'd be, you know, the start off, uh, Jefferson, you know, adored Henry. And then there was kind of this, this nasty split that really just lasted. And it's just, it's just very ironic given what they were fighting over and then sort of future debates in American, uh, political history. But anyway, that's, that's the drama. So it sounds like they really wore America's first libertarians. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, so, so now we've got this massive new spending package of the assumption of war debt benefits certain states benefit of others. It's really good if you're in the investor class. Now we're bringing in the second kind of tent pull of the Hamiltonian system, which is a new fancy central bank. Um, can you touch on just a little bit? I mean, there's some sectional differences here as well. But once again, we have Virginians kind of pushing back against the Hamilton scheme. Um, but here we have kind of this new expansion of federal power. And this goes on to something that you mentioned earlier that, you know, while the Virginians are now starting to use the Constitution a bit as a weapon against this expanding state power, it can be viewed that, you know, the creation of this new central bank, the, these new powers that Hamilton is wielding. This is a direct byproduct of the Constitution, not a perversion of it. This is why Hamilton was a fan in the first place. And now here we, you know, have in this battle over a bank, uh, even where someone like Madison, uh, might have used now that he might have had earlier. Yeah. So the, the bank, the, the national bank or the, the bank of the United States later became known as the first bank of the United States when we chartered another central bank. Uh, we weren't very creative with our names. I refer to as a central bank. Other people refer to as a central bank. It has some similarities with modern, uh, central banks. It was a, it was a bankers bank and conducted some basic aspects of monetary policy. In many ways, it was just a really large, uh, chartered, uh, bank, right, a private bank. So in order to get out of, I have to understand that back in the day, if you wanted to operate a bank, you had to apply for a charter from the government, from the state government or now from the, from the federal government, right? And so it basically was a license. When you have this charter, you have a license because you're the only one with the license or at least you and other people who have, uh, who have the charter, um, but someone else can't set up a competing bank. So, uh, when historians talk about the bank battle, they, they, they mentioned that, okay, Congress chartered a bank for 20 years. But what they don't talk about is that Congress basically said they weren't going to charter another bank for 20 years. So they're creating a giant monopoly, uh, corporation, okay, this giant monopoly bank and it was feared that it could, uh, take over other banks and just control the country and et cetera. Uh, there were various aspects of this bank, uh, that were a lot of proponents of liberal government didn't like. Aside from the monopoly feature, the government would store all of its money at the bank. This would be like a very big subsidy. You could also purchase stock in the bank with government bonds and this would further, um, uh, basically, uh, lead to high, you know, the cement, uh, speculators with the central government, uh, and, and, and so on. At a sticking point, you mentioned the, the, the sectional nature was this really irked a lot of southerners. So there was just this big battle where the North agreed that say, okay, the capitals only could mean Philadelphia for another 10 years. And then we're going to move the capital to this new quote unquote federal city soon to be known as, uh, Washington DC. And, uh, yeah, that will happen in 10 years. But then here you have Hamilton, uh, pushing for the establishment of a large bank, uh, in Philadelphia, that's going to have a charter for 20 years. So this is causing a lot of people, including James Madison to go, wait a second, the capital is not really going to move in 10 years, right? You're going to have this huge bank and this is going to by giving loans to politicians and, and basically improving the financial aspect of Philadelphia are subsidizing at the rest of the country. It's going to continue to make Philadelphia the de facto capital. So people are like, wait a second, we're not about to let you do this. This is, this is, this is ridiculous, but, uh, Hamilton kept, kept pushing for it. And in doing so, articulated what was known as the, um, the broad constructionist view, uh, broad constructionism, broad constructionist view of the constitution, which is that the constitution empowers, uh, Congress to do a lot of things, right? Even though they're not explicitly stated, so you can use the necessary and proper clause, the general welfare clause, et cetera, uh, to your hearts, you know, can desire and just pass all sorts of cronyism. This goes against Jefferson, uh, who argued for a strict constructionist view, saying that no, the constitution is one of narrowly circumscribed powers. The Congress can only do a limited amount of things, et cetera. It's important to know that basically Hamilton was right in terms of the actual constitution. Obviously, I disagree with the, the, the economic consequences of that, or I'm much more of a strict constructionist's heart. But when you look at the constitution as designed in 1787, right, it was basically, uh, what, you know, Hamilton had, it was arguing for. And this was because ultra federalists such as James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris and other big players at the Constitutional Convention, they had inserted these, these, these vague clauses in as kind of like these escape hatches. And they said, well, this constitution, uh, you got the right person in charge, you're going to be able to do whatever you want. And that's exactly what happened. And so Hamilton was really just tried, the National Bank was not unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional from the strict constructionist view, which we can talk about later on that developed subsequently. But the, it was, it was unconstitutional from the, you know, from the actual document itself. What was, um, uh, what was created in, in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and what had passed all of these state ratifying conventions was this big government document. That's why anti federalists hated it so much. And of course, you know, with the bank kind of comes its own new generation of corruption. Um, you know, there's obvious, I think there's an aspect there with within the banking and the branches benefiting certain cities over another. But one of the things I think it stands out is you highlight the degree to which members of Congress, you know, immediately owned stock in this bank, you know, those voting in favor of it. Um, and of course, perhaps the largest piece of corruption of them all in order to kind of break this, this tie between Jefferson and Madison and the Virginians opposing the ratification of this bank and the Hamiltonian side in order to get Washington across the line that there is one last land deal done within the formation of this new capital. Is this that the most blatant form of corruption within the kind of the Washington's resume here that you can find? Cause if you can expand on this a little bit. Yeah, sure. So this is, this is a, um, a deal. So to speak, a sorted deal that I always love describing the people because when I immediately read it, I thought this couldn't be true. And my pen hit the table and I had to go searching in other books and and online and lo and behold, it turns out it is true. But because it's true, it's probably why no one else talks about it is, um, basically, so the way the famous story goes is Hamilton had presented his bill for the the the bank and Congress passed it. It was dominated by federalists, particularly Northern federalists. And so in Congress passed it. And then the bill wound up on Jefferson. I mean, not Jefferson, excuse me, Washington's desk. He has the president. He has to sign the bill or he could veto it. Right. And so he had the ability to veto the bill and to then use the veto power in ways that was not intended. This is something that Andrew Jackson later did, which I think is a very good move by him. We can get into that the Jacksonian perspective on the veto. But Washington said, all right, well, before I make a decision, I want to turn to some of my trusted advisors. The most important people you know, and this is that he turned to Jefferson and he turned to Hamilton. Hamilton argues for the bank. Jefferson argues against the bank. Washington was actually leaning towards Jefferson's side. Now, ironically, even though Jefferson said if Congress passed it, you can always just defer to Congress. This is part of Jefferson's sort of perspective on a weak executive coming in. And this is this is, I think it's very unfortunate on Jefferson's part. Washington was really thinking about a veto because I think the big thing that worried him the most is, hey, wait a second, the capital is supposed to move and rechartering this big financial, you know, organization and the former capital and that's going to be a little too north north for my tastes, right? Philadelphia compared to what became Washington DC. But one issue was that during this time, why Washington was very obsessed about the capital, he wanted the capital to be on the Potomac River. But he also wanted the capital to be outside of the define this little box that basically the federalist had said, okay, Washington, you have the ability to place the site of the nation's capital. He wanted to move it outside of the box. So he could put it next to all of his land, right? Just like very blatant cronyism because this land that are having the capital there is John Adams sort of later cynically remarked boosted the value of his property by like 1000%. I mean, it was a huge windfall. So Washington agreed. He said, look, I will not veto the bank. I will sign the bank bill. If you basically if you talking to Congress amends what was known as the residence act to allow me to put the capital closer to my land. Okay, because Washington was already having his some of his goons go out and survey the land and all sorts of stuff. And I also just love the historical record pointing this out because apparently like none of them were experienced in survey, you know, surveying or any sort of land. It was just like one of them was Washington's doctor and other stuff. And he's like, he's getting his chums to do his work. And he's like, he's gonna be the site of the capital right right next to all my property. And yeah, that's basically that was one of the reasons why Washington signed the bill wasn't just Hamilton. It was Washington wanted to amend the residence act and the federalists were not going to let him do that come hell or high water unless he signed the bank bill. So at the end of the day, Washington was able to kind of get a little sweetener for the retirement account so to speak though that didn't really turn out to be so, you know, he didn't he died, you know, before the capital was more or less finished. But it helped him a lot. And we got this terrible bank that did all sorts of problems regarding monetary policy, future government intervention and so on. It's a fascinating story. And I really think it's one of the most it's one of the great illustrations of cronyism in my book, I'd say. So then there's other aspects of the Hamiltonian platform that kind of in the you know, fueling a lot of the problems that we see there's he's directly pushing for subsidizing, manufacturing, particularly I believe in New Jersey, there's a big push for all these different privileges granted to, you know, his sort of projects all involving the same sort of group of Skyler and doer and these these sorts of people. What also kind of happens though, it is in you touch on the importance of subsidizing internal land improvements as being one of and again, another one these fountains of cronyism. And there's a very major scandal that the Yazoo land scandal that involves that ends up bringing you have a Supreme Court justice outright defending his own financial interests. Can we touch about this about another again, one of these we're seeing this Hamiltonian platform just kind of create all of these these boils of corruption that are seem to be infecting like every every single governing institution in this early republic. Yeah, so the most people they know that they go through the you go through Hamilton on the report on manufacturers and this is when we get kind of some of those Colbert Colbert mercantilism, you know, those types of arguments because Hamilton saying he doesn't come out to be this ardent protectionist. He does want to have higher tariffs, but that's mainly to fund the debt. He really argues that subsidies are the best way to promote manufacturing and have basically the federal government. They were called bounties, but you can imagine these as outright you know, the money given to given to companies in that for a variety of reasons this was shot down in Congress. So this was Hamilton's sort of first real setback, though he was able to push for the higher tariffs he wanted. Using the camouflage of basically the government needs to raise money for a war against the Indians and all sorts of other stuff. But Hamilton is also big and basically justifying various the various actions of land speculators. So this is an instance of cronies and that is extremely important for understanding United States history. It does not play as much of a role now in the year 2021 in the modern era. Unlike tariffs or government subsidies or central banking or government debt, etc. And this is the fact of land speculation. So back when the United States are really the North American continent was mostly unsettled and it was sort of only nominally claimed, you know, the traditional libertarian argument for settling land is you'd have homesteaders, they would mix their their their labor with the land, they'd, you know, put a little fence around some property, etc. Various precedents in common law would decide what was appropriate homesteading, what was not and so on. But what was mainly used by a lot of a lot of people was basically you have the government claim ownership of land that it didn't do anything for it just sort of looks out of its window. So to speak and says all of that empty land over there. Yes, we claim that in the name of Great Britain or we claim that in the name of the United States and so on. And then we're going to raise the money by just selling it to these land speculators who don't own the land justly and then they sell it to your average farmer or your average settler at high prices. And it's just it's like a tax right because the farmers they actually are the ones who own the land they homestead it. But they're being forced to pay extra money for this. Okay. And this is a huge thing that leaves a lot of cronyism because speculators they would buy the you know, they these these land claims and this led to all sorts of foreign intervention and all sorts of other stuff. But at least for this period here federalists pushed for you know, they would speculate in land right they would get these titles from the government and they would then push for in the funding of internal improvements through these areas which would of course boost the value of the real estate and then they would sell them to the public right. So they sort of double built the public because one they had to pay taxes to fund the roads and canals and then they have to pay a tax again by purchasing the land from the speculators. Okay. So where does that leave us now? So Georgia back in the day in the in the in this in this in the 90s in the 1790s more or less owned it claimed ownership of what became the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Okay. Part of that land in Alabama, Alabama and Mississippi was known as the Yazoo lands. It was basically land near the near the Yazoo River, I believe. There were some Indians that had lived there live there, etc. But it was mainly relatively unsettled and and you know, farmers and homesteaders from Georgia and elsewhere were looking to settle in there. In the 1790s, the Georgia government was bribed by these massive land speculator speculation companies to sell this land to them at like bargain prices like a cent an acre, which is, you know, just just absurd to think about. And so this happens in about 1795, I want to say, Georgia, the people of Georgia find out about this, they they flip out, they vote out everyone from the Georgia legislature, they install new legislature, you know, new congressman, state congressman who then decide to rescind the land grant. So they say they tell those companies, oh, yeah, what the prior legislature did, we have to take that back. Okay. Now, what do these land speculators do? They go to Hamilton and they go to other proponents of broad constructionism of, you know, the old school federalists, what the Constitution was designed to do. And Hamilton says, well, the new Georgia legislature can't do that because of the contract clause. So the contract clause was designed at the Constitution Convention by this guy named James, James Wilson, who worked for Robert Morris and he designed it to basically protect land speculation claims. And this, of course, James Wilson owned some of the Yazoo land. So this kind of makes him look really bad, especially now, because he's a justice of the Supreme Court. And this is how the land speculators are able to defend their claims with Yazoo. And they actually do get bailed out. The Supreme Court does rule that Georgia can't do this. The speculators have a right to the land. And of course, who rules on that is John Marshall, who is also a land speculator. So there's a lot of interested moving pieces here. But the big thing to note is that Hamilton was okay with bailing out or benefiting land speculators. It's a great instance of cronyism during this time period. And of course, as one might expect, all of these again, just watching this republic kind of come and embrace this corruption that Hamilton was actually cheerleading, right? That was part of the British model that he so wanted us to emulate, combined with the physical burdens of these policies. There's some Americans that do not appreciate this, right? And one tax in particular is a tax on whiskey that has a huge effect, particularly on western farmers who use whiskey as a means of maximizing the monetary value of their crops. One of the things I think is interesting within this dynamic of the whiskey rebellion, is its connection to foreign policy. One of the slurs that the federalists start using against those defending the interests of these Pennsylvania farmers is trying to connect them right to the French revolutionaries that are cutting off heads. I think at the same time or very close to it, we have a foreign policy episode going on with citizen Genet, who is acting very arrogantly revolutionary France around and offending some people. And so you get this dynamic where you have agitation against the corruption of this Hamiltonian regime, leading to a whiskey rebellion, and this sort of effort to tie this directly to foreign policy concerns, which I think help kind of fuel and set the stage for the alien sedition acts and that sort of stuff that we'll touch on here in a moment. But can you just talk about the whiskey rebellion, which also brings to the forefront a figure that we'll get to know more later, Albert Gallatin, a Pennsylvania Republican. But just the rising frustration and Hamilton in Washington actually leading a military force to try to put down this this internal rebellion that has happened as people getting fed up with these Hamiltonian policies. The whiskey rebellion was a great example of how governments are not voluntary, how really the state, the conquest theory of the state applies because you had a lot of Westerners, not just in Western Pennsylvania, but in the Western regions of all the states you got to imagine the very the extremity, the very western part of the United States during this time period was the Mississippi River. They were very upset at the federal government's sort of supposed lack of care of them. They were upset at the Bank of the United States. They were upset at the assumption of the federal and state debts at par. And they were especially upset at the federal government's whiskey tax, which was a regressive tax that fell mainly on poor Westerners to fund some of these the assumptions of state debts. Now, Hamilton had said in the federalist papers that these what were known as internal taxes, so you can imagine not tariffs, the taxes that aren't tariffs on foreign goods, they wouldn't really be used that much. They would be confined, I think in his words to a narrow compass, sort of a narrow boundaries. Of course, that was before the Constitution had to be ratified. So now he's going to decided to push for higher taxes, you know, push for new taxes on whiskey, etc. Westerners were very upset about that. There's a lot of disobedience, you know, some people gathering some rumblings and near Pittsburgh, which is back back in the day, you know, very small town, etc. So Hamilton is urging Washington to sort of suppress the rebellion, so they basically drag about the 13,000 militiamen and then some others to Western Pennsylvania to make a demo show demonstration of the government's power. And one of the reasons they did this, I didn't explicitly mention this, but you you you alluded to this was that during this time, the we were trying to set our foreign relations with other governments. So there is the famous Jays treaty that was being in the process of being negotiated this time. And Hamilton really wanted to sort of flex the muscles of the United States to show that, hey, we're we're tough, just like you guys, because we can bully around our citizens, so to speak. You know, it doesn't really help his case, but I think it sort of illuminates some of the motivations. The rebels disperse Hamilton was basically in charge of the soldiers for a long period of time after Washington left. Hamilton wanted to Hamilton his forces. They wanted to round up some of these suspects or accused agitators. One of them was Albert Gallatin, a former anti federalist Hamilton and some others. They wanted him and his supporters to be really tried. And then back then this this disloyalty of the government could be met with by execution by death. Not those don't happen, but Gallatin gets the picture and he gets kind of scared. But it's a great example of how the government, you know, it's a great insistence of cronies and the government first assumes state debts, right, which benefits a lot of speculators, and they pay off these state debts by raising taxes on poor people, right? And these poor people resist. The government sends in the gendarmes to site to stamp them out, right? The military. And it shows that Hamilton really had, in my view, he had bigger ideas than just being a secretary of the treasury. When I think this is kind of gonna be where we leave it on this one. But I think this connection continues on. And really, you know, if we think about the Adams administration, for example, you know, perhaps the great accomplishment was him keeping America out of a war. And he did so against sort of the agitations of people like Hamilton, who were trying to use the inspector general position that he got at the behest of Washington to try to put America and pit them against France on the side of England. But it seems that this is kind of what Hamilton, you know, Hamilton, you know, Hamiltonism devolves into, right? You know, the Hamiltonian regime becomes a means of using force against anyone who stands in its way to get its ends because the underlying, you know, system here doesn't work very well. And again, you know, taking that position, I know you touch on the book, the aspirations that Hamilton and his allies had for expansion and, you know, eyes on the treasuries of, of, you know, Mexico and Peru and South America, right? When you're talking about an empire of power being the aspirations of this side of the founding generation, this is quite literal. And again, it seems to be this is what sets the stage again for what the Federalist Party, or at least the Hamiltonian wing of it really stands for during the Adams administration, which fuels the excesses of the Aliens Edition X, which ends up sparking the Virginia response, which is, you know, the Virginia resolutions and the Kentucky resolutions and really embracing that sort of nullification mindset, and kind of sets the stage for, I believe you call it a People's Revolution in 1800, the excesses of the ending of this Hamiltonian regime. Yeah, absolutely. So Hamilton, his, his, all of his policies are sort of building up to talk about this, more or less kind of becoming sort of groping towards, you know, just becoming a permanent leader of the military. Hamilton's original background was in the military and trying to build up the United States into becoming this empire of power into a model after Great Britain, a country that Hamilton had enormous respect for. So we would have a strong government. We would be practicing all these mercantilist policies. Granted, we might not have a king with unlimited powers, but neither did Great Britain. They had solved that during its own, their own revolutions in the, in the 1600s. But this strong government would be basically commanding a domineering presence on the world stage, have a strong military would be able to take over territories, have its own colonies, etc. In that the Hamilton and the federalists, they overreached and this really led to the backlash against this big government power, against all of this cronyism by Jefferson and his new Republican Party really trying to return back to the anti federalist roots. And this is where you see the strict constructionist view of the Constitution take shape, so on and so forth. Hamilton, of course, gets stopped. And this really changes the path of American history. Yes. So the federalists have won the first three elections. They have now lost the, you know, the election of 1800. And that gives us a great opportunity to move into the Jeffersonian era, which we will do in next, the next episode. But that this has been Liberty versus power for Patrick Newman. This has been though Bishop, if you are enjoying this content, please rate and review, tell your friends, help us spread the reach here. And until next time, we'll continue on the narrative of the forces of liberty going up against the, the empire of power. Thank you very much. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what are you, what are you saying?