Today's Elites

Friday, December 16, 2011

Roasting the London Economist's Chestnuts

Today, the London Economist sententiously opines on Christianity and America, except they have left something out. I hereby charitably reprove them:

Alexander Hamilton before being killed by Burr had proposed to outflank the venal Burr's takeover of the Federalist party by founding a Christian Constitutional Society. Now, the sort of Christianity that Hamilton would have supported can be best gleaned from his stark attack on Adam Smith's doctrine of free trade in his Report on Manufactures. The recognition that the City of London's (and Wall Street's) East Indies Company's practices were (and are, still today) the true successors of that evil Roman Empire that ordered Jesus' crucifixion, is the true lesson in anything decent, whether nominally Christian or otherwise, which has arisen on these shores from the time of the Massachusetts Bay Charter. The object of all men of good faith must be to eradicate the modern day Leviathan of "global governance" and return to the principle of a harmony of sovereign nations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had envisaged when he admonished Churchill that the U.S. would no longer tolerate the rot of British Empire's colonial methods.
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2 comments:

  1. R.E.A.T.I.6:25 AM

    I'm going to ignore the implication that a company with equity in it's capital structure (or may be you're referring to the fact that it was a multinational corporation) is inherently evil. Unless of course you're talking about the ability of these early MNCs to profit unfairly from rent seeking behavior, in which case we're not talking about the free trade that Adam Smith advocated.

    Instead, I'd like to point out that is completely ridiculous to mention FDR as an example par excellence of how to govern/maintain rule of law from a more local and/or bottom-up perspective. He pushed through most of the New Deal by using executive orders, which is about as top-down as you can get.

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  2. Thingumbob6:31 AM

    I don't know how you surmised that I was extolling FDR as a model of "bottom up perspective" (unless you mean the end of prohibition.) Hamilton was a dirigist and actively promoted the development of projects to do public good. This was in keeping with Cotton Mather's acknowledged influence on Benjamin Franklin creation of the principle heralded in the preamble of the Constitution of the United States, i.e. that the purpose of the government must promote the general welfare. This principle is what Smith explicitly attacked in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he claims that mankind can only operate on the basis of mere passions without any foresight as to the future well being of society at large. This "moral relativism" of the East Indies Company is expressed for example in the virtual enslavement of China via the opium trade. Whatever the market will bear, eh what?

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