Timothy Birdnow

This is a good read.

Indeed he is right. Hamilton was a proto-fascist. People think of Fascism as a 20th century thing, but it had it's roots in the 18th century and Hamilton personified it. That is the war we are fighting today - fascist/marxist v. Jeffersonians.

I would add that the Civil War was a battle between these two forces, something Livingston was afraid to touch on here but it was true enough.

Frankly, America owes its one-time freedom (it's no longer a free country) to a number of men, among them Jefferson, Aaron Burr (who put an end to Hamilton) and Andrew Jackson, who killed the Bank of the United States. Oh, and don't forget James Polk, the best unsung President in American history. .

And it can be argued Robert E. Lee helped by being so capable in prosecuting the War Between the States. Had that not happened the U.S. would likely have grown to leviathan size in short order.

Anyway, here is the article from Bob Livingston:

" Thomas Jefferson wrote about Alexander Hamilton in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush:

The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them.

He paused for some time: "The greatest man," said he, "that ever lived, was Julius Caesar."

Mr. Adams was honest as a politician as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.

Indeed, "The people are a beast," said Alexander Hamilton. This seems to imply that the people collectively are the common herd, subject to manipulation. Hamilton had great contempt for the people. As far as he was concerned, anything goes that authority wants.

Hamilton's Federalists were the party of big government, British mercantilism (crony capitalism), and a national bank. They supported debt, tariffs, money creation and strong ties to England (Hamilton was a hireling of the Bank of England).

Is it any wonder the mainstream would laud a theater production depicting Hamilton's exploits?

While it's true that Hamilton was a principal author of The Federalist Papers and championed the adoption of the United States Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, as Thomas J. DiLorenzo points out in his book "Hamilton's Curse," Hamilton immediately began to work to undermine the Constitution's tenants as President George Washington's first Treasury Secretary.

What Hamilton really favored was a strong central government. In fact, Hamilton opposed the Articles of Confederation because it did not empower a centralized government. He wanted America to be ruled by a king that would have supreme power over all the people. He favored making the states provinces with governors appointed by — and therefore loyal to — the king, or "His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of Their Liberties," as the Senate one proposed as the official title.

Reminiscent of today's Democrats, Hamilton later described the Constitution as "a frail and worthless fabric."

Among the legacies of Hamilton and his acolytes is the idea that the Constitution granted the Federal government "implied powers"—powers that were not actually in the Constitution but that statists like Hamilton wish were there.

While small government advocates in the Jeffersonian tradition won out over the Hamiltonians in the beginning, the statists in the Hamiltonian tradition never relented in their efforts.

Finally, in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the passage of the 16th Amendment (granting the power to lay and collect taxes) and 17th Amendment (changing the way Senators are selected), the Hamiltonian philosophy prevailed.

Hamilton's economic philosophy is in play today, and is the source of our country's economic ills.

If we are to return to the republic the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and James Madison envisioned, we must end the Federal Reserve and repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments.

Freedom-loving Americans who are interested in devolving themselves of the glossed-over public school history they learned — and the false history being perpetuated today — should read "Hamilton's Curse," but also, realize the true nature of our political divide: statism vs individualism.

As the Abbeville Review pointed out: "America's political divide began as an ideological battle, and thus far the only one in our history, between two of President George Washington's Cabinet officers, a fight that also pitted the two great regions against each other — Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton from New York and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson from Virginia. It is a clash that is still raging today. In essence, the real breakdown today is not Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, but Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian. This is the sum total of our whole political dispute."

While he was Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton used the Gazette of the United States as a house organ for the Treasury Department and in turn supported the paper with money from the Treasury Department in the form of "advertising." He also leaned on friends and business associates to purchase ads in the paper in exchange for "favors" from the government. He also used the paper to prop himself up and excoriate his enemies — most notably Thomas Jefferson.

Why? As Abbeville noted, "Jeffersonians believed in limited government, federalism, sound money, low taxes and tariffs, no national debt, government separation from banks, no support for corporations or big business, a strict construction of the Constitution, including the protection of civil liberties held by the people and a non-interventio nist foreign policy. Simply put, the Hamiltonians believed in the merits of government; Jeffersonians trusted in the people to govern themselves."

The assault on Jeffersonian individualism by statists in the media has not abated. In the almost 250 years that Americans have existed as a distinctly different people, the citizens of the country that French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville first called "exceptional" in his 1835 work "Democracy in America" have lost a great deal of exceptionalism by placing their trust in the "news" delivered by Hamiltonian hands.

What would Hamilton think of the presidency now? Over the years, particularly since the middle of the last century, politicians have sought to turn the presidency into a pseudo-monarchy . They adore and expand upon the trappings of office rather than eschew them. They grovel for great sums of money, sell their souls to the banksters and corporatists, and lie to the people in order to obtain office.

Recent presidents have usurped more and more authority from Congress, and Congress has ceded its authority willingly. Now the President and the Republican who seeks to replace him will both believe the president has the authority to make war without Congressional approval, kill U.S. citizens at his discretion and imprison Americans without charges and hold them indefinitely without trial.

Would Hamilton be mortified by those prospects? His venerators certainly are not. Believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men is the mantra of the politician and government bureaucrat, and they believe that, by the high and lofty positions they've obtained, they and only they are capable of governing the American "great beasts."

Your duty as an American is to counter these abuses.

So on this Presidents' Day, let's recall some wisdom from Victor Sayer writing in the US Observer:

When you step up to the ballot box, you have a duty to support only a public servant who will faithfully uphold and obey the Constitution, as they will swear an oath to do.

When you bear arms to defend yourself and others against the aggressive wrongdoer, you perform your duty as a citizen in preserving a free state.

When you refuse to accept a share of the loot seized from your fellow Americans, you take a stand for what is right. Your rights do not allow you to take something from another person against his will — or to have agents of government do that taking for you. That would be wrong.

Remember what is wrong, learn to identify it and put a stop to it. Civil liberty exists only when the people take action to prevent natural wrongs from being inflicted upon any one of us."

Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:57 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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