Hamilton vs. Jefferson Round Two

“Jefferson was very precisely in favor of laissez-faire, or free-market, capitalism. And that was the real argument between [Hamilton and Jefferson]. It wasn’t really that Jefferson was against factories or industries per se; what he was against was coerced [economic] development, that is, taxing the farmers through tariffs and subsidies to build up industry artificially, which was essentially the Hamilton program. Jefferson … was a very learned person. He read Adam Smith, he read Ricardo, he was very familiar with laissez-faire classical economics. And so his economic program … was a very sophisticated application of classical economics to the American scene … classicists were also against tariffs, subsidies, and coerced economic development…. The Jeffersonian wing of the founding fathers was essentially free-market, laissez-faire capitalists.” ~ Murray Rothbard

Here is what Thomas DiLorenzo has to say about this debate, which has been very popular on this blog:

“Compared to Jefferson, Hamilton was an economic ignoramus. His reputation as some kind of financial genius has been greatly exaggerated and fabricated, as the great late-nineteenth-century Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote in his 1905 biography of Hamilton. In his Report on Manufacturers, for example, Hamilton presented the cockeyed notion that international competition would cause higher prices and protectionism would cause lower prices by causing domestic producers to compete more vigorously with each other. History had proven this to be an absurd idea long before Hamilton’s time.

Hamilton also condemned transportation costs, calling them “an evil which ought to be minimized” through protectionism. Of course, transportation costs also affect interstate trade, but Hamilton never voiced his opposition to them in that context. Hamilton was such a mercantilist that he even argued in favor of “a monopoly of the domestic market” by banning all imports altogether. It is little wonder that William Graham Sumner referred to Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures as a mass of economic confusion, just the opposite of a “profound and practical understanding of markets.”

For those of you who debated me on this before I feel as this reaffirms my points from the first post found here. Now do not get me wrong. The Jeffersonian principles have disappeared from the Republican party but he is definitely closer to libertarian than modern liberal, like the Democrats think.

The rest of Economist Thomas DiLorenzo’s article is here.

~Barry AUH2O