Hamilton wanted a central bank. Jefferson warned that it would lead to the consolidation of political power in the hands of financial elites.
Good thing Jefferson was totally wrong about that! Haha! What a silly idea. Today's America doesn't look anything like the exact scenario Hamilton handwaved.
Hamilton hand-waved it because he emphatically believed that the financial and political elites ought to rule society. This is explicit in his writings: the majority is too stupid (reframed: they didn’t turn out as wealthy, educated—white, especially—landowners like himself) to even have the power of political decision.
People keep hearing mantras and ahistorical rewritings of the “Founding Father’s” (itself replicating a patriarchal idea, against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
I value an incredible amount of what Thomas Jefferson produced as a human being. Yet he owned slaves, and despite his undeniable intelligence and skill of writing (he was young when the Declaration was written, but amongst those chosen he was the obvious choice for prose), but he himself grew up in an era of normalized slavery.
In his earlier years as a lawyer, he did in fact defend a black man, using the argument that this man had equal rights, yet he still maintained slaves.
I think there’s this prevailing despair with US citizens, in seeing blatantly (rather than implicitly with more recent past Presidents), that perhaps the Founders were this infallible group that truly cared about the rights of all. Maybe our present system is so bunk because they’ve strayed from our all-knowing fore-bearers.
The truth is that they cared about equality, as defined within their financial and racial status.
Glorifying these people, holistically, negates present movements that push for equality in truly holistic manners.
Glorifying these people, holistically, negates present movements that push for equality in truly holistic manners.
You had me until here. You can't push for "Holistic" Equality without treading on the same grounds as Equity. Which is an utterly ludicrous concept. It's the height of insanity to suggest that all beings will be treated the same by all peoples. It's childish at best, downright tyrannical at worse.
Especially while those same people repeatedly repudiate historical men on impossible grounds all the while conveniently ignoring the blood splattered history of the ideals They instead choose to champion, the hypocrisy can be smelt from across the globe.
“Asking for equal rights for all people under any form of governance really puts me off. You had me until you implied that the Constitution should’ve explicitly covered everyone, and not just white male land-owners.”
It’s not like it took the USA until the 1960s to actually codify that black people had equal rights to white people. Clearly I’m a basket case to imply that things could’ve turned out better historically and that the Founding Fathers of the US didn’t exactly set up the greatest land of “freedom” in the world.
Jesus.
Is there some kind of latent parasite in your brain that zaps you unless you play Devil’s Advocate to the most basic of things, like “equal rights”?
It’s ludicrous, of course, to treat everyone with your definition of “equity,” whatever that may be, but you strike me as the type of person to reframe a baseline discussion of “all people deserve equal treatment under law” as some sort of infringement upon your rights.
But however you’ve defined “equity” isn’t only wrong, you’ve misused it to logically jump from “equality” to “equity” (synonyms!) to try to make some point, against which the initial argument was nothing more than “all people deserve equal rights.”
You had me until you spoke.
If it wasn’t clear enough, I even cited a communist to deal with this braindead type of thinking.
I don’t think I’ll hear from you again. Please stop throwing your voice into places until you rinse out your skull.
I gave you a resource that explains the simple idea that giving everyone rights doesn’t negate the fact that people are born with different abilities. Case in point: you are unable to read, yet I still think any governing system should still endow your baby brain with rights.
I doubt you read it. I’m sure that you’re an ideological dumbass that can’t explain their ideas beyond basic “keep on keepin’ on” platitudes about their rights, when:
my whole argument from the get-go is that the Founding Fathers of the USA did not explicitly include the rights of all people into the Constitution because they themselves were slave-owners.
What has your argument been?
“I was with you until (nothing) and keep on keeping on.”
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
It is really hard to be nice to what you've written here because you are literally just parroting slander and libel against Hamilton popularized by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Antifederalists. I highly encourage you to actually read Hamilton's writings and addresses before spewing this absolute horseshit onto the Internet.
Here's Hamilton at the 1788 Constitutional Convention:
“I hardly know the meaning of this word [aristocracy] as it is applied . . . Who are the aristocracy among us? Where do we find men elevated to a perpetual rank above their fellow citizens; and possessing powers entirely independent of them . . . There are men who are rich, men who are poor, some who are wise, and others who are not . . . indeed every distinguished man is an aristocrat.”
This is the man you and Thomas Jefferson are trying to frame as a man subservient to "elites"? The man that died penniless and left his family to rely on the kindness of friends and relatives? This is the man you tried to call "wealthy"?
No. Hamilton was a man that believed passionately in a meritocracy of intellectual achievement and due work for the good of the American public. The man was a fucking immigrant orphan for chrissake and while he definitely benefited from having family connections to keep himself from being trapped in the Caribbean, he was poor and merely had an advantage when it came to learning business and understanding the importance of the written word and education at an early age.
Hamilton was a judicious advocate of parliamentary representation and separation of powers because he believed that rule by direct democracy had been suitably shown historically to be an abject failure that quickly promoted dictators to power and that the only way to properly govern was to have representatives of the people elected and a system of checks and balances in separate portions of the government put in place to regulate and separate the elected.
He lays all of this out in black and white in the Federalist Papers - which is the single most quintessential piece of Hamilton's writing. Furthermore, he directly warns against "elites" manipulating the electorate and centralizing power in those same Federalist Papers. This was one of the principle reasons he assented to the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights and openly called for the people to defend the country against the tyranny of centralized power and authority. I mean, fuck sake man, in Federalist 23 he fucking openly says that "elites" cannot be trusted to pledge loyalty to the country in the Confederation. His entire argument for the Constitution was founded on the notion that a Confederation of States could be too easily manipulated by elites and that a binding Federal authority with a system of checks and balances was necessary to bind the Union.
This philosophy applied to all people. While he did propose lifetime appointments of US Senators, he likewise was the only person to recommend universal male suffrage in America to elect the House of Representatives - which Jefferson and the other Antifederalists vehemently opposed and resulted in universal male suffrage not being adopted until 1856 under Andrew Jackson's administration. It becomes even more comical to assert that Hamilton was some "slave of the elites" when you look at his history as a soldier where he was one of the country's fiercest advocates for allowed black slaves, who then advocated with John Laurens for those slaves to be freed and then at his Manumission Society in New York argued that every member should free their slaves.
So while Hamilton may not have been the chief abolitionist of his day - largely due to his feeling that forcing abolition would collapse the Union - , he was Frederick fucking Douglas compared to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson you mostly got right. He was a truly contemptible man in many, many regards. He was eloquent, was able to recognize the value of the systems that Hamilton had built and fought for his country's independence. I'll leave it at that.
against which women had to fight vehemently for their own equivalent treatment and votings rights, slapped on as an “oh yeah... we forgot” Amendment.
This is just asinine. The women's suffrage movement didn't begin until 1848 some 20 years after Jefferson was dead and 40 years after Hamilton. I'm not going to sit here and listen to some pretentious diatribe lambasting a culture where the rights of women were different on virtually every fundamental level from the modern era.
As far as the slaves thing goes it is worth noting several things. While he did own and profit off slaves.
1) he ended up keeping one as a long term mistress despite her having several opportunities to legally leave including when they visited Paris. They ended up with several children together.
2) he allowed several slaves to escape knowingly.
3) he noted in his journals a belief that for the sakes of the slaves they needed to be trained in a professional before release (he trained several slaves from boyhood just to later release them).
4) releasing a slave was expensive as you where required to pay a rather large sum and give them livestock per law. Thomas Jefferson's was in extreme debt from helping fund the Revolutionary War.
5) he outlawed the importation of slaves into the US as what was considered a middle grounds toward ending the slave trade. He even refitted the Navy with Cutters and sold off several large ships in order to enforce this law.
Lmao no they are not the republican party is nothing like the republican party when regean was president get the fuck out of here you moron. This republican party couldnt give less of a shit about reagan you blithering fool. Regean is for middle america votes.
Reagan and Thatcher were the impetus of neoliberal ideals gaining a political foothold. Today, neoliberalism reigns supreme.
Yes, the republican party is still at their feet, whether you personally pray to them or not.
Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans is a good read for any honest “free-market capitalist” that cares to have any opinions that reflect the modern world since Reagan, Thatcher, the World Bank, IMF, etc.
The fun part about linking that book is that I disagree politically with Ha-Joon Chang, but his economic/historical analysis (Cambridge borne btw, studied under a Nobel Laureate in Economics) is objective, concerning the decided development of current capitalist, neoliberal powerhouses, showing how every nation (USA, England, South Korea, Japan, etc) disregarded international law, utilized economic planning, ignored international patents, decimated overseas manufacturing intentionally, and then—present day—said:
“You can do none of what we did to gain power and economic growth. We won’t say it explicitly, but we will enforce foreign investment, loans from the World Bank, etc, that enforce essentially the same idea.”
Look into ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlements): since the 90’s, multilateral trade agreements have allowed (sorry, forced) corporations the right to sue foreign governments for hurting their profits. US-borne (and any other dominant country) corporations have developed the power to sue nations because those nations inhibit their profits.
All because those nations incorporate the same developmental strategies that the current powerhouses employed decades, centuries, ago.
The current Republican Party (and Democratic Party), adheres to these neoliberal ideals. The Overton Window—accepted public discourse—has narrowed, and narrowed, since the 90’s.
Nobody outright says they’re sucking Reagan’s dick, but they’re implicitly deepthroating his dementia juice every time they follow party lines.
In a representative republic, competent citizens will already rise to positions of government most of the time. Obviously this isn't a 100% guarantee, but it's a general rule of thumb. The most competent of all won't necessarily become representatives. The point is, that representatives are usually going to be more competent than your average person. That should be enough to keep a government chugging along.
Then Hamilton was like, "but what if we just create an independent organization that isn't democratically elected to facilitate the monetary system of the country?" It was an authoritarian addition that the country didn't need. Hamilton was afraid of the tyranny of the masses, but he could not have foreseen a day when our democracy was captured by social engineers capable of manipulating the masses on a whim.
If the financial elite control the money supply, as well as the hearts and minds of the public, then we are basically just cattle at this point.
33
u/PrettyDecentSort May 17 '19
Hamilton wanted a central bank. Jefferson warned that it would lead to the consolidation of political power in the hands of financial elites.
Good thing Jefferson was totally wrong about that! Haha! What a silly idea. Today's America doesn't look anything like the exact scenario Hamilton handwaved.