PBS Salutes Alexander Hamilton
I don't watch much TV at all because I think about 99.8% of it is crap, but once in a while I watch a show that does the medium tremendous credit. Last night on PBS I saw a documentary on my favorite founding father, Alexander Hamilton. It was excellent and worth your time.
Two points that the documentary brought out quite well:
1) "one of the greatest of history's ironies" was that Hamilton, the entrepreneurial, up-from-nothing immigrant, went down in history seen as an advocate of powerful, entrenched interests, while Jefferson, slave-owning, landed aristocrat, went down to posterity as a defender of the common man. The truth is the opposite.
2) Future grateful generations built monuments to the towering figures of the founding and early America. Our capital has major monuments to Washington and Jefferson but none for Hamilton. Historian Richard Payne ends the program with the observation that we live today in a monument to Hamilton. The America that we know today is more than anything Hamiltonian, and our experience is his monument.
Bite-sized wisdom from Hamilton on the 'real' path to tyranny here and supply-side economics here.
Two points that the documentary brought out quite well:
1) "one of the greatest of history's ironies" was that Hamilton, the entrepreneurial, up-from-nothing immigrant, went down in history seen as an advocate of powerful, entrenched interests, while Jefferson, slave-owning, landed aristocrat, went down to posterity as a defender of the common man. The truth is the opposite.
2) Future grateful generations built monuments to the towering figures of the founding and early America. Our capital has major monuments to Washington and Jefferson but none for Hamilton. Historian Richard Payne ends the program with the observation that we live today in a monument to Hamilton. The America that we know today is more than anything Hamiltonian, and our experience is his monument.
Bite-sized wisdom from Hamilton on the 'real' path to tyranny here and supply-side economics here.
posted by Donny Baseball at 12:04 PM
2 Comments:
It seems that Hamilton didn't trust the judgement of the common man. I guess if he were a bit more patient, or lived a bit longer, he would have changed his mind.
I would argue that none of the founders actually trusted the judgement of the common man, least of all Jefferson. So Hamilton was no exception in this regard. Hamilton did however trust people to act in their own self-interest and thus advocated free-market policies and encouraged capital investment and asset markets. Indirectly, via his belief in markets, he made a much stronger statement in favor of an individual's judgement than Jefferson ever did.
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