Liberty Maven

One of Liberty Maven’s (soon-to-be) Liberty Heroes, Thomas DiLorenzo, was interviewed by columnist Ilana Mercer. DiLorenzo, who recently wrote Hamilton’s Curse, discusses at length Hamilton’s strong desire for mercantilism in this country, and throws the stated desires of Obama and McCain into the mix for comparison purposes.

Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers and myriad other politically active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like ACORN, who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.

As for McCain, DiLorenzo says, in part:

John McCain is virtually a poster boy for Hamiltonian mercantilism: He favored a dictatorial executive branch, foreign policy adventurism and he supported the Wall Street Plutocrats’ bailout bill, which of course was pure Hamiltonianism.
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Hamilton was also obsessed with using the powers of the state to pursue “imperial glory” in war, and itched for a war with France, just as McCain itched for a war with Iran (for starters). That also makes him quite the Hamiltonian.

DiLorenzo goes on to describe how Hamilton worked feverishly after the ratification of the Constitution to “read between the lines” to attempt to create a National Bank and “expand the dictatorial powers of the executive branch…far beyond what the Constitution called for.” Ever since he Civil war, at least, the Hamiltonian school of thought has taken over, and has, in fact, served to “rewrite” American history as taught by educational systems today.  Obama is a prodigy of such a system.

I recently received an e-mail from a young conservative law student at New York University Law School who thanked me for writing critically of Hamilton. He was sick and tired of being lectured to by his law professors (such as Nadine Strossen of the ACLU) about the glories of the “Hamiltonian” interpretation of the Constitution, which essentially is a roadmap for ignoring constitutional constraints on government. Obama is a Harvard-trained lawyer who also embraces this subversive legal philosophy. Before the election, a tape emerged of a speech he made just a few years ago where he complained that the Constitution had not yet been sufficiently “reinterpreted” by leftist judicial activists to allow a really radical redistribution of income. I expect him to appoint dangerous socialists like himself to the federal judiciary.

Read Part 1 of the DiLorezo interview here.  Part 2 is here.