I noticed that Thomas DiLorenzo has a new book out about Alexander Hamilton. While I haven't read it both the title [Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today] and book jacket suggest that this is a continuation of DiLorenzos's efforts to uncover the root of centralized government and the supposed breakdown and "death of federalism."
DiLorenzo reveals how Hamilton, first as a delegate to the
Constitutional Convention and later as the nation’s first and most
influential treasury secretary, masterfully promoted an agenda of
nationalist glory and interventionist economics—–core beliefs that did
not die with Hamilton in his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Carried on
through his political heirs, the Hamiltonian legacy:
• Wrested control into the hands of the federal government by inventing the myth of the Constitution’s “implied powers”
• Established the imperial presidency (Hamilton himself proposed a permanent president—–in other words, a king)
• Devised a national banking system that imposes boom-and-bust cycles on the American economy
• Saddled Americans with a massive national debt and oppressive taxation
• Inflated the role of the federal courts in order to eviscerate individual liberties and state sovereignty
•
Pushed economic policies that lined the pockets of the wealthy and
created a government system built on graft, spoils, and patronage
• Transformed state governments from Jeffersonian bulwarks of liberty to beggars for federal crumbs
By
debunking the Hamiltonian myths perpetuated in recent admiring
biographies, DiLorenzo exposes an uncomfortable truth: The American
people are no longer the masters of their government but its servants.
Only by restoring a system based on Jeffersonian ideals can Hamilton’s
curse be lifted, at last.
The book jacket follows the standard formula used in his two previous books, which castigate Lincoln for instigating an unnecessary war and using it to further the agenda of the "great centralizer." DiLorenzo isn't so much interested in Lincoln as a historical figure but as a case study to further his own Libertarian agenda. Remember, DiLorenzo is not a trained historian but an economist. I have no doubt that he is a very good economist, but it is almost impossible to take him seriously as a Lincoln scholar. While he vehemently complains about the overwhelming number of Lincoln apologists you will find very few references to Lincoln studies after 1950 in his bibliographies. He rarely challenges the interpretations of those he disagrees with. In his first book DiLorenzo rails against protective tariffs, the Morrill Act, railroad subsidies, national currency, income tax, the Homestead Act, and of course, emancipation by military force. He also blames Lincoln for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which extended the power of the courts.
Please keep in mind that I have no problem with this approach to the past. There is even an entertaining quality as you feel the momentum of the narrative build to a point of satisfaction and vindication for the writer: "You see, he really was anti-American." Kind of reminds me of a political campaign mentality set to a pseudo-historical narrative. The problem is that the reader ends up learning more about DiLorenzo than about the period he is writing about. I now know that DiLorezno believes in Libertarian principles of small government and free markets. My problem is that I could have learned that from one of his publications in an economics journal.
Now DiLorenzo has set his sites on the Founding Era as Americans worked through their experiences going back to the American Revolution, the Critical Period of the 1780s and the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In it DiLorenzo finds a battle between good and evil rather than a moment in early American history where the fundamental questions of the proper scope of the federal government and the states, along with the very meaning of individual liberty, were being worked out. Along the way DiLorenzo intends to debunk the mythmakers (as he supposedly did with Lincoln scholars) such as Ron Chernow whose massive biography of Hamilton is a must read. There is a reason why books by Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and Thomas Woods are referenced as further reading on Amazon's site. DiLorenzo's approach to the study of the past is ultimately an extension of his political and economic world view. You can forget about Hamilton as a historical subject because DiLorenzo isn't interested in that. What matters is that in light of what DiLorenzo believes Hamilton was wrong and ultimately to blame for all of our contemporary woes. Perhaps another way to put is that DiLorenzo is interested primarily in converting the reader to Libertarian principles. History become a means to an end in DiLorenzo's hands.
I assume that DiLorenzo's next book will focus on the centralizing tendencies of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There you will find a great deal of central control over public morality. It turns out that the "City on a Hill" was the first step down the long road of corrupt government and the suppression of individual freedom.
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