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ondelette (October 5, 2008 08:18 AM ):
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. (William Jefferson)
The conflict between the economics of the libertarian Jefferson and those of the authoritarian Hamilton is still playing itself out in American history, most recently and visibly as Wall Street's extortion of a 700 billion dollar balloon payment from Main Street.
As Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Hamiton's Curse, puts it in his essay "What Hamilton Has Wrought",
"The great debate between Hamilton and Jefferson over the purpose of government, which animates American politics to this day, was very much about economic policy. Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system – the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from – to America. He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo151.html