David Brooks offers us another steaming pile of Stupid. This time, he’s concerned that some folks on the left are complaining about income inequality and ultra low taxes on the wealthy, so he attempts to invoke Alexander Hamilton as the kind of guy who would have no truck with class warfare. Yes, it’s odd to summon the ghost of the foremost advocate of a strong central government to argue for the virtues of limited government, but this is David Brooks we’re talking about here, and nonsense is the name of his game.
He creates something new, which he calls the Hamiltonian Tradition even though the thing he describes has nothing to do with Hamilton. But that’s all just jive-talk. The real meat of the piece is his assertion that the progressives, the New Dealers, and the folks of the New Frontier and Great Society were all well-intentioned people who simply went too far. They wound up creating a system that has unsustainable debt, invests in the wrong things, and morally corrupts the American people. Now, mind you, he’s saying all this in the context of a complaint about criticisms the left has aimed at the very rich.
About a year ago, the Center for American Progress issued a report on what our debt would look like if there had never been any Bush tax cuts. They started out with a reminder:
President Bush inherited perhaps the strongest federal balance sheet in postwar history. There were record-high surpluses, debt was at around 30 percent of GDP and falling, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal government would be debt free by 2009. The country was in great fiscal shape to deal with any crises or emergencies coming down the road, and it was even ready to deal with the coming retirement of the baby boom generation.
Now, a sane or honest person might ask how we could have been in such great shape if the progressives, the New Dealers, and the Great Society folks had screwed up the system and corrupted all our morals. I mean, debt-free in 2009 sounds pretty good. But it didn’t happen. And rather than learn from that mistake, the Republicans refuse to raise any taxes on the wealthy at all, instead insisting that all the budget balancing come out of government services, research, and investments. They created a debt crisis with their policies and now they want to dismantle a century of progressive government to pay for their folly. They gave the ultra-rich twelve years of absurdly low taxes that directly ruined our balance sheets, and now they refuse to allow any of those people to pay into the system. No wonder people are getting angry with the rich. You’re going to make me work two more years before I can collect Social Security just so a billionaire can keep a few more million bucks?
David Brooks continues to concoct new ways to excuse this behavior, and he’s probably going to burn in hell for it.
David Brooks has no business using the word moral in any form. He should back under the rock he crawled out from under.
Dude is obsessed with morals. He basically thinks the American people have none.
Psst, BooMan, We Jews (Brooks sadly included) don’t believe in Hell. Just sayin’.
That makes it all the more poignant, doesn’t it?
David Brooks always likes to invoke “Hamiltonian Conservatism,” which is odd because I think the term accurately represents Barack Obama. Other than the normalcy of corruption in our politics — and due to this normalcy I find the administration to be desperately lacking in any real corruption — Hamilton and Obama would probably agree on most everything.
And yes, Hamilton was an advocate of meritocracy, but he was by no means someone who wanted to leave people out on the street just because they couldn’t “produce wealth.” And yes, Hamilton had a disdain for democracy, but times were different. The average person wasn’t educated enough to make decisions about the country, and they were also usually poor. Different time = different context. Hamilton was first and foremost my definition of a “technocrat.” What works best for the most people is what we should do. Single-payer is the cheapest and most efficient way even if it leaves some stuff to be desired? So be it: our system will be single-payer; just a simple example of his thought processes.
Hamilton might be able to be claimed by both liberals and conservatives just the same as Thomas Jefferson can be claimed by both. What idiots like David Brooks cannot do, however, is imply that Hamilton would be a Republican in the modern era.
PS: If we cannot count Thomas Paine among the Founders (some don’t agree he was a “true founder”), then my favorite founder, by far, was Alexander Hamilton.
The greatest of our founders was Thomas Jefferson. If you want to dispute that, I’ll accept arguments for George Washington or Ben Franklin, but I won’t accept arguments for Alex Hamilton.
Yet, I would take Hamilton’s side in a dispute with Jefferson. What do you expect? I’m from Jersey. I’m not gonna sign off on that agrarian anti-banking attitude.
But, seriously, Jefferson understood religious issues better than anyone else. He is the secular Founder. He was the brain of the Revolution.
George Washington was the mediator between Hamilton and Jefferson. But Hamilton’s ideas — from how our government is set-up to the ideas are behind our economic growth — saved the country before it even started. Had no one come up with a solution to the war debt, we’d be sunk. Or have had a civil war a 100 years earlier. And then where would we be in 1812?
Besides, in some ways our take on religion has been a detriment when compared to the secular countries of Europe. I often wonder if it’s our freedom that’s caused this strange obsession to clinging to religion, or our Puritan elders. Probably both. Still, to me, the First Amendment is paramount.