Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 23:30:33 -0700 (PDT) From: James Baird <jlbaird3 at yahoo.com>
> Hamilton, the man who created dirigisme out of
> mercantilism, lover of
> protectionism, not a big fan of civil liberties or
> democracy...That
> Hamilton?
>
Yep, that's the one. Oh, I'll grant that the man was no friend of democracy(in his time and place no one was). But the policies he implemented were instrumental in turning the US (the northeast of it, anyway) from a semifuedal agarian state into a modern industrial and yes, capitalist, democracy.
Jefferson, for all his florid rhetoric, was essentially a reactionary. Hamilton and his followers, as distasteful as they seem to us in our context, were the real progressives in theirs.
Whatever happened to the strain of leftism that sees capitalism as an improvement on what existed before, and as a nessessary precursor to socialism?
Jim Baird