An illegitimate, self-taught orphan born in the Caribbean, the immigrant Alexander Hamilton rose to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, co-authored The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.
Summarizes Ron Chernow on the importance of Hamilton’s legacy:
“We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.”
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The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown, Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, examines the origins of communism, its spread in different nations, its collapse in the Soviet Union following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe.
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Frederic Bastiat’s 1850 classic, defines the law as “collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense,” and shows how this same law has been perverted, “annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain, [aiding] the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the liberty and property of others.”
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The Wealth of Nations (1776) is an inquiry into what creates wealth in a society, and explains the workings of markets to create wealth through trade and production under specialization under a division of labor, as if they are guided by an “invisible hand.”
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At the start of the 20th century, Ludwig Von Mises was one of the few brave individuals who warned of how government creates inflation and depressions and why socialism does not work (except to destroy civilization). His ability to explain economic phenomena and the workings of the free-market under laissez-faire capitalism is based was based in part on his theory of praxeology — the science of human action.
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