American System

And, uh, as you said, the, um, yeah, the industrial capitalist or economic nationalist, uh, the Alexander Hamiltons and Friedri- Friedrich Lists, you know, they would refer to s- some of the excesses of free trade as free trade imperialism.

And the, the antidote was, uh, a century of the American system, which meant, uh, you know, these three pillars.

They would have their, uh, m- manufacturing base, which they would develop through subsidies and tariffs.

They would develop their physical transportation with, uh, ports and roads, uh, later rail.

And the third pillar was then the national bank.

And, uh, you know, the American system, it served America very well.

They became very, uh, developed fast, became very wealthy in the 19th century.

And what you saw was copied by the French, the Germans, uh, end of the 18th century, 19th century, the Russians, but you also saw the Japanese.

And then in the pivotal year of eighteen twenty-four, uh, we see, um, more efforts to use the proceeds from those protective tariffs, which are very sectional in, in their, uh, economic relations.

Henry Clay has been, uh, pitching what he calls the American System, where he wants to see the federal government building internal improvements, even on credit, using the new Second Bank of the United States and, uh, also implementing a permanent protective tariff regime to fund those internal improvements.

Uh, in eighteen twenty-four, we see a bill out of Congress that has the support of Clay and his more Hamiltonian faction of the time, a general survey bill for canals and roads.

We, we also see a rise in debate in Congress about the constitutional question of internal improvements.

He then points to Webster's own change of position on both subjects.

Now Webster is an advocate of the Second Bank and wants to preserve it.

Now Webster is an advocate of the protective tariff regime, the American system, because he has a different constituency.

He has the manufacturers of New England.

Adams states the situation as follows, "...the slaveholders of the South have bought the cooperation of the Western country by the bribe of the Western lands, abandoning to the new Western states their own proportion of the public property, and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their own hands." End of quote.

Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West.

Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system.

At the same time, he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the states of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands.

His bill for that purpose passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the states in which the lands are situated.

But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson.

said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841, I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers.

It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements, the American system of the nationalizing Whig Party, was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs.

Right, so you recall that America's mostly fake victory in the War of 1812 and the subsequent collapse of the Federalist Party ushered in the Era of Good Feelings, which was another way of saying that there was basic agreement on most domestic policies.

The American system was a program of economic nationalism built on, one, federally financed internal improvements like roads and canals, what we would now call infrastructure, two, tariffs to protect new factories and industries, and three, a national bank that would replace the first bank of the United States whose charter expired in 1811.

You'll never guess what we called this second bank, unless you guessed that we called it the Second Bank of the United States.

The main supporters of this American system were our old friend John C. Calhoun and our new friend Henry Clay.

Both were Jeffersonian Republicans, which isn't surprising because that was the only political party, but it's kind of surprising because the American system had nothing to do with the agrarian republic that Jefferson had championed.

But whatever, this was the era of good feelings, so we're gonna go with it.

By the way, this nationalism also extended to foreign affairs.

Rated PG-13.

We basically have that one bet.

Trump is trying to do something else with a more Hamiltonian style thing of returning jobs to America, but for a couple years probably, that's going to raise prices.

It's gonna take a fair amount of time for all of those projects to really begin to be in a construction phase, for some of them to come out of construction and actually just be a place that people go and work towards or work at.

Uh, so that's gonna take some time.

I think that will stall things out there.

Uh, and then obviously we've got AI is meant to carry basically all of the growth.

So we've got Hamiltonian, where we protectionist for a bit, we get factories back here in the US.

Okay, that, that's part of the plan to be sure.

End of quote.

Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West.

Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system.

At the same time, he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the states of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands.

His bill for that purpose passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the states in which the lands are situated.

But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson.

said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841, quote, End of quote.

It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements, the American system of the nationalizing Whig Party, was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs.

And so these three core planks were all implemented in the wake of Kerry's rise.

And this basically starts to become more systematized under the umbrella of the American system, which is most popularized by the Kentuckian politician Henry Clay in America.

And Clay becomes a big proponent of this.

And he's a he's a disciple of Kerry.

And I think...

I don't want to say this is the Hamiltonian American system that Tom Luongo likes to punch out and Promethean Action Systems likes to constantly talk about because I think that narrative was shot in the face the minute we bombed Iran, to be quite honest with you.

Iran was a mistake.

They tried to fit it into their Hamiltonian-shaped plan, but it just really doesn't make sense.

But I do think the control of the Western Hemisphere speaks more to the regions of influence.

Where we run the Western Hemisphere, Russia and China can duke it out in their hemispheres, and I think that's why you see all the panic out of Europe, because they're now a middle power, and they realize that it's no longer the West.