Some of the most telling moments in history are when we look back and see people in a vastly different world behaving exactly as people do today. From 286 to 305 Diocletian, one of Rome’s most powerful and consequential emperors, tried to fix the political and economic systems which he inherited and were teetering on the brink of collapse. In doing so, he made mistakes remarkably similar to those made by people in government today.
The world Diocletian inherited was staggering out of the Crisis of the Third Century, a 50-year period that saw 26 claimants to the imperial robes, most of whom seemed guided by nothing more than personal greed and ambition. Relatively speaking, Diocletian brought stability and good intentions to the Roman state and helped it persist for another 150 years.
But virtually all of Diocletian’s individual reforms sought a stronger imperial state that exploded in both bureaucracy and godlike pageantry in an attempt to engineer prosperity from the top down. The astonishing part is that after more than 1,700 years, after the development of economics as a field of study, and under the auspices of liberal democracy, governments today proceed with largely the same instincts.
Is Four Greater Than One?
The man who would become known as Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus Augustus was born in present-day Croatia in the year 244. He first came to power as many emperors did, with an army under his command proclaiming him as such, and ultimately defeating other military rivals.
Diocletian realized that his vast empire was too large and complex to be ruled by a single man. This insight about the limits of top-down control may have been forward-thinking, but his solution shows how deeply important the elites of his time viewed a strong centralized state. By 293, Diocletian had fully formed the tetrarchy, where two junior and two senior emperors bound by a set of marriages would each rule a quarter of the empire.
This limited sharing of power at the top only enhanced the imperial state’s ability to control Roman society. Historian Warren Treadgold estimates that Diocletian doubled the number of government bureaucrats from 15,000 to 30,000. He doubled the number of provinces in the empire (giving rise to the dioceses around which the Catholic Church still organizes today). In addition, Diocletian dropped longstanding pretenses of cooperation between the emperor and other civil and military institutions, and presented himself and co-emperors as godlike during highly formalized ceremonies.
These changes were highly successful from the perspective of the Roman state’s continued existence and dominance. And unlike famous tyrants like Caligula and Nero, Diocletian’s wielding of power seems more paternalistic than predatory. However, just like the most well-intentioned large-scale state interventions today, Diocletian’s reforms ultimately showed the futility of attempting to create a healthy society by edict.
We see the assumption especially among today’s political left that a more powerful central government staffed with the right people will heal society’s ills. But putting a society under increasing central control magnifies the damage done by mistakes from one or a small group of people. Though likely spearheaded by co-emperor Galerius, the Diocletianic Persecution of Christians was the largest and last of such organized pogroms. Concentrated power can go from benevolent to catastrophic very quickly.
The tetrarchy was also supposed to bring an end to the corrosive wars of succession that plagued Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century. But the state apparatus carefully put in place by Diocletian and his associates likely made imperial power even more attractive. Constantine, the son of co-emperor Constantius, was snubbed in a handoff of power within the tetrarchy. That, of course, led to the end of both the tetrarchy and large-scale Christian persecution in the empire.
Economist in Chief
Stephen Guerra, host of the History of the Papacy podcast, reminds us that Diocletian’s worldview was likely molded by his time as a general. Applying that logic to Rome’s economy, he tried to order people and merchants to make the economic decisions he thought best. The analogy is a telling one. The entire structure of a military, including its suppression of individual freedom, is geared toward making large groups execute orders from the top down. Imposing such a structure on an economy many times larger, more complex, and more central to the everyday lives of millions is utterly impossible.
It’s perplexing, then, that if one strips away the military despotism of Diocletian’s world, the economic measures he took parallel our debates today. Writing in 2012, my colleague Peter C. Earle gave a helpful description of those policies and their similarities to the Keynesian proposals of Paul Krugman.
On the fiscal side, Diocletian’s policies could fairly be labeled as tax-and-spend. He unleashed the imperial state’s torrential new bureaucracy on finding out just who everyone in the empire was (through a census) and calculating exactly how much they owed the government. Diocletian raised rates and closed loopholes: citizens of the Italian peninsula lost their centuries-old tax exemption. He was not shy about putting these funds to use: he was a prodigious builder and conqueror and greatly expanded public aid programs.
This fiscal approach made solving the runaway inflation Diocletian inherited impossible. The empire’s coins had been debased to the point of near worthlessness during the Crisis of the Third Century, as the endless stream of imperial usurpers needed ever more currency to buy the support of armies.
Diocletian began minting new coins with higher precious-metal content funded in part by confiscating metal jewelry from citizens, a move that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 20th century. This new currency kept the state and military going but did little else. The urban poor could never get their hands on the new, more stable currency. Much of it instead went right back into the state’s expansion, with historians going so far as to suggest that the very system to assess and collect taxes demanded a significant portion of the tax revenue:
He … created so many boards, commissions, and bureaus that every Roman with any pretensions to political pull had a government job, while his less fortunate fellow-citizens were fast being taxed to death for the support of a benevolent bureaucracy.
Still battling inflation, Diocletian went into full commander mode: if merchants kept raising prices, impose price ceilings by the sword. The Edict on Maximum Prices, published in 301, attempted to set price ceilings for over 900 goods and wages for 130 occupations. At first the edict closed businesses, caused shortages, and sparked unrest. It was ultimately mostly ignored.
Diocletian’s only action that isn’t still a part of our political and economic debate today is the wide menu of price controls, and even those would have neatly fit in the five-year plans of some states less than a century ago. Knowing the full consequences of Diocletian’s reforms is difficult, since that snub of Constantius’ son quickly led to more civil war, the retaking of the empire by one man, a massive shift in the balance of religious power, and a new imperial capital.
It’s possible that without Diocletian’s reforms, Constantine would not have had an empire worth conquering and converting. But cast in terms of the economic well-being of most of the empire’s citizens, Diocletian’s policies collided with the limits of top-down control again and again.
Battling History
What to make of the fact that Diocletian’s policies resonate so deeply in our debate 1,700 years later? Earle notes that Diocletian had essentially no economic theory at his disposal. On the contrary:
With 2,000 years of recorded history between the 3rd-century calamities of the Roman Empire and the present day — plus a handful of recent, well-documented economic crackups perusable amid a wide range of discredited economic theories — what excuses can Krugman offer?
Many will point to the obvious political, economic, technological, and cultural differences between Diocletian’s time and our own. And in a sense they’re right. The fact that an interventionist state funded by high taxation and coinage didn’t work in Diocletian’s time does not on its own provide an open-and-shut case that it wouldn’t or doesn’t in our own.
My own takeaway is that the parallels speak to parts of human nature older and deeper than economic theory — the sense that results are best achieved through direct or top-down control. All the economic theory in the world espousing markets, competition, and individual choice can only partially cure us of this illusion.
History has shown that the instinct to command an economy like a general presents itself across many people in many ways. Diocletian may have greatly strengthened the Roman state, but that extra strength appears not to have dented poverty, inflation, or civil war. Today the instinct to increase state power to achieve desired outcomes is thriving on both sides of the aisle. The best and only way to counter that tendency is bottom-up thinking based on the capacity of people to manage their lives without imposition from the top. .
Epilogue
Whether by design of his tetrarchic system or due to illness, in 305 Diocletian became one of Rome’s only emperors to abdicate and retire. He settled in his massive palace whose ruins are still prominent in the modern-day city of Split, Croatia to do what any former god-like ruler would do: he raised cabbages and other vegetables in his garden. As the imperial system he left behind began to teeter, an emissary appeared asking Diocletian to return to power and restore stability. Diocletian’s legendary response was probably written by later historians, but rings through the ages as one of history’s great quotes:
If you could show the cabbage I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.
We can’t pretend to know what truly made historical figures from millennia past tick. But I like to think that Diocletian’s peace and happiness came from finally finding something he could control with his own hands.
History podcasting is making rigorous, well sourced, and entertaining storytelling available to anyone. I’m indebted to Mike Duncan’s History of Rome and Stephen Guerra’s History of the Papacy podcasts for much of the inspiration to write this piece.
The Impossibility of Negative Rates


The economics discussion would be greatly enhanced if it were better understood that underlying all spending, selling, saving, lending, borrowing, and investing is an exchange of products, services or labor. Real things are always and everywhere being moved around when “money” changes hands.
It cannot be stressed enough that “money” is just an agreement about value that only has use insofar as there’s already wealth. Money does not instigate despite what economists, pundits and politicians tell you, rather it’s a consequence. We produce goods, we save them, we direct them to higher uses in the near-term since our needs are long-term (investment), and money is merely the medium that facilitates the movement of real things.
This requires mention ahead of what AEI resident scholar Paul Kupiec wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Writing about the alleged tax implications of the impossibility that is “negative interest rates,” Kupiec observed that “the Fed hopes to avoid resorting to negative interest rates during the next recession, [but] without them the central bank’s ability to stimulate growth may be limited.” No, that’s not correct.
Readers should never forget that no one borrows dollars. Never. They borrow what dollars can be exchanged for: once again products, services, and most crucial of all to productive economic activity, labor. It’s all a reminder that the Fed’s ability to stimulate or shrink through its rate mechanism is only real in the eyes of economists, the media members who enable them, along with politicians who simply don’t know any better.
In the real economy, we borrow real things when we seek dollars, which means that the notion of Fed “ease” is pure fantasy. For one, dollars are the measure used to facilitate lending globally. Assuming a slowdown in U.S. economic activity, or a retrenchment by U.S. economic actors, the globalized nature of dollar credit means that increasingly austere market providers of dollars will overwhelm any artificial attempts by the Fed to rewrite reality with so-called “easy money.” In other words, what the Fed falsely “gives,” market sources of credit will take away.
After which we must return to the simple truth that the Fed can in no way increase access to the products, services and labor that borrowers seek when they borrow dollars. Implicit in Kupiec’s analysis is that the Fed can decree easy access to economic resources by merely fiddling with a rate. No, it can do no such thing.
And since some will ask, it’s worth briefly stressing that the Fed can’t alter the truth about price controls either. Assuming the Fed could decree zero or negative rates that market actors would actually abide (they wouldn’t, but let’s briefly imagine that they might), such a scenario would logically result in credit scarcity. Get it? When cities decree artificially low apartment rents, access to the latter shrinks as opposed to increasing. To believe the Fed can create abundance of credit through imposition of artificially low rates is much less than serious.
Which brings us to Kupiec’s mere suggestion that the Fed could engineer negative rates in a recession, and that doing so would prove stimulative. No, that’s an impossibility.
To see why, consider what investors do when they buy bonds. They in simple form buy bonds for say $100,000 now with an eye on getting the $100,000 back in the future, plus interest (let’s say for fun, 3%) throughout the life of the debt instrument. In short, they’re buying income streams meant to produce more than $100,000 for them over yet again the life of the bond. But that’s not what they’re really doing. With investment it’s always an exchange of resources with a view to attaining more resources in the future.
To buy a bond is to shift resource access to the borrower (think yet again products, services, and labor) in the present in order to attain access to products, services and labor in greater amounts in the future. Products for products. Always.
Yet explicit in negative rates is that investors, corporations and other holders of dollar wealth would quite literally provide resource access to borrowers in the near term worth – say – $100,000 in order to receive less than $100,000 worth of resources down the line. It’s all a reminder that in the real economy, negative rates are an impossibility. Once again, no one buys bonds, or the income streams that bonds pay out, as much as they buy the right to access greater amounts of goods (the income streams exchangeable for goods and services) in the future. Explicit in negative rates is that investors and businesses would literally invest in order to shrink the exchangeable value of their investment in the future. No chance.
In Kupiec’s defense, he acknowledges the above truth, though somewhat vaguely. He notes that when “corporate treasurers first faced negative deposit rates in Switzerland and Denmark, they looked for new places to park their cash balances.” Well, of course they did. Imagine what the stock market would look like if businesses were knowingly putting their dollar, euro, yen, Pound (name the currency) profits to work with an eye on shrinking their value. Or imagine if investors were pursuing negative returns.
Thankfully they don’t have to. Explicit in the market impossibility that is negative rates is that there’s a “glut” of savings such that economic resources are worse than useless. No. Not happening. Not during a recession, and not during a boom. Such a view is rather ignorant per Henry Hazlitt. So long as people have unmet wants, meaning forever, and so long as innovative thinkers have visions for improving, or better yet transforming our future, interest rates will always be positive to reflect the expense of accessing resources to bring the future into the present.
So what of negative rates? They do exist, don’t they? Yes, but what Kupiec left out is that the owners of these negative-yielding debt instruments aren’t investors, businesses or individuals; rather they’re central banks, insurance companies and pension funds. Oh well, central banks exist at the pleasure of governments, while insurance companies and pension funds operate with varying degrees of protection from government. And even the three entities mentioned have limits to how dense they can be. Ultimately insurance companies and pensions must produce returns, and central banks must remain somewhat solvent. In short, their capacity to absorb what is mindless has limits.
Looking ahead to the next downturn, economic laws will still exist. No doubt central banks cheered on by economists will promise all manner of interventions to allegedly soften the blow. And they’ll fail. Thankfully so. If central planners could truly alter reality for the better, as so many so sadly still believe, then the 20th century wouldn’t have been the murderous disaster that it was for so many. What’s too bad is that these lessons still haven’t sunk in with economists lucky enough to have prominent perches from which they’re empowered to preach what defies simple common sense.
Alexander Hamilton, the Other Tariff Man Who Created a Mess


One of the many unsettling features of Donald Trump is his deep-seated antipathy to the time-honored doctrine of free trade. Even as early as 2016, Trump devoted a substantial portion of his Republican Convention speech calling for the adoption of protectionist tariffs and other trade restrictions against “any country that cheats.”
He proceeded to blame NAFTA for a litany of largely-imagined economic woes in the industrial sector; reiterated his support for an import-substitution regime to internalize manufacturing and tech production in the United States; likened the trade deficit to the federal budget deficit; and railed incoherently against that favorite modern-era scapegoat of all of America’s purported trade ills, China.
In the following years, Trump only doubled down on his calls for alleged economic autonomy, threatening to take the United States out of the World Trade Organization, imposing vast tariffs against any country with whom the US runs a “trade deficit,” threatening more tariffs as a political bludgeon, daily introducing more uncertainty about the rules in a way that has made business cautious to invest.
Protectionists are not new to American politics, though they do buck the trend toward a managed but certain trade liberalization, advanced by both major parties over the past eighty years. In his own idiosyncratic and sometimes vulgarized way, Trump represents the resurgence of an economic philosophy as old as the republic itself: that of Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton’s “Fortress America” Economic Policy
A skilled, if often mistaken, political commentator in his own right, Hamilton was the father of the direct antecedents to Donald Trump’s favored economic system. Over the course of almost 30 years in political life, Hamilton developed a program of sometimes nuanced but assertive economic nationalism. He believed that trade restrictions were crucial to the development of the fledgling nation’s “infant” industrial base, as well as a guardian against practices of European nations that he deemed unfair or harmful to American interests.
To attain this result, Hamilton advocated a complex and carefully tuned system of “bounties” (essentially, subsidies to boost American companies against their competitors abroad) and protective tariffs to insulate American industries from foreign competition. Hamilton and his political heirs coupled this prescription with an aggressive program of harbor, canal, and road infrastructure spending, often called “internal improvements.”
These public works projects would in turn provide the means to transport American-made products to American consumers, thereby bypassing the alleged “dependency” on Europe for manufactured imports. As an added bonus, their construction would supply American workers with jobs and industry in its own right.
Hamilton’s Plan to Make America “Grand and Glorious” Again
The parallels to Trump’s agenda are no accident. To quote the great classical liberal economist William Graham Sumner, Hamilton’s mind was “completely befogged in the mists of mercantilism.” This affliction lasted from his earliest forays into politics as a young soldier in the revolutionary army until his most famous economic treatise, the deeply protectionist “Report on Manufactures,” that he wrote as Secretary of the Treasury in 1791. To Hamilton, economic “autonomy” — maintained through an extensive system of state regulations and economic management — was a primary feature of the American experiment.
“Food and clothing we have within ourselves,” he wrote in 1774. The rest could be cultivated with a policy of forced economic independence. Hamilton continued:
Our climate produces cotton, wool, flax, and hemp; which, with proper cultivation, would furnish us with summer apparel in abundance… We have sheep, which, with due care in improving and increasing them, would soon yield a sufficiency of wool…
It would be no unbecoming employment for our daughters to provide silks of their own country. The silk-worm answers as well here as in any part of the world. Those hands which may be deprived of business by the cessation of commerce, may be occupied in various kinds of manufactures and other internal improvements.
If, by the necessity of the thing, manufactures should once be established, and take root among us, they will pave the way still more to the future grandeur and glory of America; and, by lessening its need of external commerce, will render it still securer against the encroachments of tyranny.
Trumpilton Trade: Winners vs. Losers, Cheaters vs. Suckers
This aggressively autarkic pronouncement gave way to greater nuance as Hamilton’s politics matured, but protectionism always remained a constant feature of his message. In 1782, he pressed its strategic propriety in a blistering assault on the national government’s lack of regulatory powers under the Articles of Confederation.
“To preserve the balance of trade in favor of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy,” Hamilton declared. “The avarice of individuals may frequently find its account in pursuing channels of traffic prejudicial to that balance, to which the government may be able to oppose effectual impediments.”
Trade regulation, to Hamilton, was the essence of economic policy. Free trade, he complained, stood “contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.” Rather, commerce must be subject to “the encouragements or restraints of government.” The “power of regulating trade ought to have been a principal object of the Confederation,” he continued, laying out the case for a national authority to regulate commerce that would come to pass under the new Constitution of 1787.
Hamilton’s 1791 Report turned these sentiments into prescriptive policies. Deeming foreign demand for American agricultural products “too uncertain a reliance” for the fledgling nation, he called for the use of economic regulations, tariffs, and bounties to create “a substitute for it, in an extensive domestic market.”
The reason for these policies, according to Hamilton, was an allegedly unfair playing field abroad. “If the system of perfect liberty to industry and commerce were the prevailing system of nations,” he argued, free trade would have merit. “But the system which has been mentioned, is far from characterising the general policy of Nations. The prevalent one has been regulated by an opposite spirit.”
Echoing Hamilton, Trump advanced a boorish but conceptually identical argument in the March 10, 2016 Republican debate: “Take China as an example. I have many friends, great manufacturers, they want to go into China. They can’t. China won’t let them. We talk about free trade. It’s not tree free trade; it’s stupid trade. China dumps everything that they have over here. No tax, no anything.”
Who Could Be against “Improvements”?
To complement his managerial approach to international trade and domestic industry development, Hamilton also used the 1791 report to propose a national infrastructure plan. “Improvements” favoring the transportation of goods, he argued, were an object of any government. In this area, “The United States stand much in need.” He continued:
The symptoms of attention to the improvement of inland navigation which have lately appeared in some quarters, must fill with pleasure every breast, warmed with a true zeal for the prosperity of the country. These examples, it is to be hoped, will stimulate the exertions of the Government and citizens of every State.
There can certainly be no object more worthy of the cares of the local administrations; and it were to be wished that there was no doubt of the power of the National Government to lend its direct aid on a comprehensive plan. This is one of those improvements which could be prosecuted with more efficacy by the whole, than by any part or parts of the Union.
If these features sound familiar, consider the following line from Trump’s acceptance speech: “This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans — we will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions more jobs.”
It is more or less the same argument, updated by about 200 years of technological advance and distilled into the bombastic platitudes of an idiot.
Pro-Immigration — in Theory
If Trump’s trade protectionism is essentially less coherent Hamiltonianism, what about its close cousin in immigration? Trump has infamously appealed to the nativist tendencies of American populism, ranging from his proposal to build a massive wall on the American border with Mexico to a range of notorious “security” deportations and immigration restrictions, in the name of fighting crime and terrorism.
Alexander Hamilton was, famously, an immigrant himself. He also diverged from Trump in his pairing of immigration and protectionism. The 1791 Report contained an extensive defense of “promoting of emigration from foreign Countries” and linking this policy to his broader program for the state promotion of manufactured goods.
Though he struck liberal policy tones on immigration for his day, Hamilton’s immigration views were not without nuance, and an uglier side emerged toward the end of his life. Hamilton proved quite capable of espousing openly xenophobic and nativist beliefs, often to the surprise of his contemporaries who knew of his own birth on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
One striking episode came to print in 1796, involving a dispute between Hamilton and William Findley, a congressman from western Pennsylvania who had harshly criticized Hamilton’s role as Secretary of the Treasury in instigating the Whiskey Rebellion.
Addressing the Irish-born Findley and Swiss-born politician Albert Gallatin, Hamilton “censured the people [of Pennsylvania] for electing us.” According to Findley’s recollection:
[Hamilton] expressed much surprise and indignation at their reposing so much confidence in foreigners, that Gallatin and I were both foreigners and therefore not to be trusted.
When it was answered, that I had been in the country from my youth, &c. and that Mr. Gallatin had come into it very young and had been a citizen a competent length of time, to be legally qualified for trust, that we were both sensible men, and had a sufficient stake in the country, to secure our interest, he persisted in saying, that we were bad hearted men and dishonest politicians.
Perhaps “foreigners are bad hearted men” was 18th century shorthand for “the Mexicans are sending us drugs dealers, criminals, and rapists.”
Trump’s Dream: The Alien and Sedition Acts
Hamilton also served as something of a behind-the-scenes cheerleader of perhaps the most severe anti-immigration policy to emerge during the founding era, the legislative package known as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. This set of four bills is best known today for its penalization of “sedition” — the criminalization of certain forms of political speech that the Federalist Party used to persecute opposing newspaper editors.
The legislative package’s other three less-discussed provisions actually pertained to immigration:
- The Naturalization Act of 1798 increased the required residency period for an immigrant to obtain naturalized citizenship from 5 to 14 years.
- The Alien Enemies Act authorized the imprisonment or forcible deportation of non-citizen males coming from any country with which the United States was in a state of declared war (note that this provision extended to persons who would have also lost their citizenship eligibility under the Naturalization Act).
- The Alien Friends Act granted the president wide authority in times of peace to order the detention or deportation of foreign nationals that were deemed “hostile” to the United States, and to prescribe severe restrictions on the durations that targeted persons could remain in the country.
These draconian measures came into being as a product of early anti-immigrant sentiments tied to the undeclared Quasi-War with France, which Hamilton played a key role in fomenting. The Quasi-War itself was an outgrowth of the French Revolution, entangling the United States in a state of degrading diplomatic and eventually naval relations with a succession of governing regimes in France.
As Hamilton’s political adversaries, the Democratic-Republicans, had expressed early sympathies for the French Revolution, the episode also functioned as a prime opportunity for the Federalists to whip the American public into a state of alarm about the presence of alleged subversives and other “treasonous” elements who supposedly threatened to import a Jacobin “Reign of Terror” into the fledgling United States.
In reality, the Federalists’ driving motivator was likely a combination of (1) a ploy to strengthen the case for war with France, and with it the establishment of a “defensive” army under Hamilton’s command, and (2) an old-fashioned ballot suppression scheme to disenfranchise immigrants, who tended to vote for the opposition Democratic-Republicans.
Hamilton followed the bills’ progress through Congress closely. While his role in their drafting is confounded by the destruction of Hamilton’s personal papers — and a disputed assignment of blame to him by Hamilton’s bitter enemy, President John Adams — there can be little doubt that he approved of the anti-immigration measures.
As Congress debated the bills, he wrote Secretary of State Timothy Pickering for information about their progress. Hamilton informed Pickering of his opinion that “the mass [of Aliens] ought to be obliged to leave the Country,” though he wished for Congress to carve out exceptions for persons “whose situations would expose them too much if sent away & whose demeanour among us has been unexceptionable,” and he asked that their enforcement “not be cruel or violent.”
Nonetheless, his position was clear. Hamilton supported deporting foreigners on suspicion of threat to the United States, which in his own time entailed the publicly inflamed specter of Jacobin revolutionaries in France. It is not difficult to see the parallel “national security” rationale for the Alien Acts of 1798 and Donald Trump’s own vulgar plan for banning Muslims from entering the country.
The Long Shadow of Hamilton
Most of the alien and immigration restrictions were quickly repealed after the Federalists fell from power in 1800, though they served as an unsettling precedent for subsequent anti-immigration measures across American history. The Alien Enemies Act remained on the books however, and provided an important legal pretext for more aggressive measures enacted under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Since then, economists have also debunked the reasoning behind Hamilton’s neo-mercantilist economic system, but its popular appeal has persistently lingered over American politics. Hamiltonian ideas directly sustained a trade-penalizing protectionist regime into the early 20th century.
Unfortunately Donald Trump has reinvigorated one of America’s oldest and most dubious political traditions, and this time it’s coming with all the reckless ambition of its founder, but none of his intellectual sophistication or erudition.