That’s what Pat Buchanan said to me as I sat down next to him last fall at the MSNBC studio in D.C. where I was invited to discuss my new book, Hamilton’s Curse. Forbes and the Wall Street Journal published articles praising Hamilton around the same time, while absolutely trashing his nemesis Jefferson, even blaming him and his anti-central banking views for the current depression! (The problem is that the Fed is not powerful enough, wrote John Steele Gordon in the WSJ).
Murray Rothbard once explained as clearly as anyone ever has, why the Washington establishment worships Hamilton so much: “Hamilton and the Federalists believed in ever-expanding power of the federal government, a myriad of governmental regulations, controls and special privileges in economic life, the crushing of the states, and limiting the rights of the individual. Their ideal was the British model — a strong monarch ruling the country in behalf of the “general welfare . . .”
As such, it was “in the profoundest sense, un-American,” wrote Rothbard, a “retention of the typically European forms of strong central government and semi-socialist ‘planned economy.’”
