Anti-TPP Group Advocates Alexander Hamilton’s “American System of Economics”

One group attacking Obama’s TPP “free trade” fraud is the American Jobs Alliance, whose advisory board includes Louisiana’s former Republican Gov. Buddy Roemer and former Reagan Administration Commerce Department official and labor economist Clyde Prestowitz.

The AJA includes in its online statement a coherent brief (backed up by a somewhat longer, and also competent) description of Hamilton’s American System:

“What is the American System of Economics? With roots dating back to George Washington and his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the American System, also called the American School of economics, is the economic philosophy that guided U.S. national economic policy from the earliest days of the Republic, through the Civil War to the early 1970s, and built the United States from an agrarian frontier society to the world’s largest economy and greatest industrial power.

“The American System economic philosophy consists of three basic tenets for government to follow:

“1. Promote domestic industry through high import duties, or tariffs, on selected imports and/or subsidies for domestic producers;

“2. Invest in a public infrastructure (roads, ports, dams, irrigation and water projects, public schools and scientific research) to facilitate commerce and fuel private enterprise; and,

“3. Create a national bank to oversee national monetary policy and regulate credit to spur economic development and deter speculation.

“Alexander Hamilton first proposed the American System. Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, requested by President Washington, laid out a plan for the federal government to nurture the growth of domestic manufacturing industries in the United States instead of having the new nation depend on manufactured goods imported from abroad.

“In this report in 1791 Hamilton wrote: “The wealth…independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.”