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This week, I offer you a barefoot sermon from the battlefield of economic memory. A walk from Hamilton to Trump. From Ricardo to Argentina. From Abraham Lincoln’s top hat to the red-capped defiance of tariff diplomacy. A retelling of the American experiment through its most potent and most misunderstood weapon: the tariff.
I argue here that Donald Trump, however clumsy and chaotic, reignited a long-dormant Hamiltonian flame. Like Lincoln before him, who used tariffs not only to industrialize the North but to bleed the profits from slavery’s Southern engine, Trump reached for tariffs not as isolation, but as revolt. The goal was disruption of the quiet exploitation that still oils the gears of the global economy.
We begin with Hamilton. In 1791, he laid the blueprint for industrial sovereignty. While Britain imagined America as a spice colony, exporting raw goods and importing refinement, Hamilton saw something else. He saw factories. Foundries. Credit. Fire. His tariffs were not walls, but scaffolds. They wrapped the infant industries of the North in protection until they could stand on their own.
Then came Ricardo, bond guru, master of the ledger. He preached comparative advantage, but assumed capital stayed still. That the factory would never chase the lowest wage. That trade was neutral. That power did not intervene. Hamilton saw the flaw long before it became scripture. Ricardo’s theory, elegant on paper, became a passport for colonial subjugation. Had America followed it, she might have become another Argentina. Rich in soil. Poor in ambition. Governed by landlords. Exporting the future in exchange for someone else’s present.
Build the factory. Raze the plantation. Lincoln saw it in cotton. Trump saw it in Asian factories. In both cases, the profit was buried in the poison, and each man, in his own era and fashion, had the rare courage to call it by its name.
To strike slavery and build a more enduring republic, Lincoln and maybe Trump, did not reach first for cannonballs or proclamations but rather they reached for the balance sheet. They understood that if you make the ledgers bleed, the system follows. That is their courage.
Hugh
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