Bob takes on the slanders against Alexander Hamilton and the British-finance axioms most Americans still carry — and why Hamilton's bank is not the Fed.
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Saturday Class - Hamilton's American System and His Slanderers Today - September 19, 2026
Bob takes on the slanders against Alexander Hamilton and the British-finance axioms most Americans still carry — and why Hamilton's bank is not the Fed.
Hamilton Didn’t Cut His Way Out of a Debt Crisis. He Built His Way Out.
The Fight Is Not Capitalism vs. Communism. It Is the American System vs. the British Financial Empire.
Watch the full class on YouTube
In this week’s Saturday Class, Robert Ingraham refuses to sing a song to the American System. He does something harder. He asks you to check your own assumptions — the ones you may not know you hold — and to see where they came from. Most of them, he argues, came from London.
The Opening Challenge
Ingraham warns the class may feel “a little confrontational. Not hostile, certainly not hostile.” Then he puts a list on the screen: printing money produces inflation; higher wages produce inflation; tariffs raise prices; debt and credit are synonyms; free trade is the pathway to prosperity.
None of these are true, not a single one of them.— Robert Ingraham
He calls these the axioms of British imperial finance. As long as Americans are trapped inside them, no number of lectures on Hamilton will land.
You’re not gonna really understand what it is if you believe any of these things.— Robert Ingraham
The Slanders Against Hamilton
A second slide: Hamilton was pro-British, a monarchist, a socialist, a tool of the Rothschilds; his bank was America’s first central bank; the Federal Reserve is the same thing.
Almost all of the attacks on Alexander Hamilton really originate in London.— Robert Ingraham
1688: When Wealth Was Redefined
After the Dutch invasion of England in 1688, London created the Bank of England, reorganized the British East India Company, and built the London Stock Exchange — all in private hands. Ingraham names what that meant: the subjugation of the sovereign nation-state to money-driven private oligarchical finance.
The Renaissance commonwealth principle defined wealth as building a nation for the common good. After 1688, wealth became the possession of money — an oligarchical view contrary to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution. By 1763 the British financial empire held unprecedented global power.
This is really what we revolted against in 1775.— Robert Ingraham
Mont Pelerin Is British, Not Austrian
Who carries that empire’s economics today? The Mont Pelerin Society, founded in Switzerland in 1947 and bankrolled almost entirely by the Bank of England — created to destroy the American System and America’s post-war anti-colonial policy. Alongside it: the Adam Smith Society, Henry Jackson Society, Atlantic Council, International Churchill Society, and Chatham House.
Mont Pelerin is sold as the “Austrian school.” Ingraham says there is no such thing. Read Hayek. Read von Mises. Their heroes are Gladstone, Lord Acton, Cobden, Adam Smith, the Mills — British aristocrats and East India Company men. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek calls pre-1900 British laissez-faire “the golden age of mankind.”
They don’t mention Abraham Lincoln. They don’t mention George Washington. They don’t mention William McKinley, and they certainly don’t mention Alexander Hamilton, who they hate.— Robert Ingraham
Carey: Two Systems Before the World
Henry Carey — Lincoln’s economic advisor — framed the real fight in The Harmony of Interests (1851):
There are two systems before the world. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism. The other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks toward universal war, the other toward universal peace. One is the English system, the other we may be proud to call the American System, for it is the only one ever devised, the tendency of which is to elevate while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.— Henry Carey, 1851
Most people hear “two systems” and think capitalism versus communism. That is not the fight. It is the American System of progress against a financial empire of looting and war.
Hamilton’s Bank Is Not the Fed
Hamilton’s bank made loans to manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation. It was prohibited from monetizing U.S. government debt. The Treasury audited it and could intervene. It did not set monetary policy or print legal tender — that belonged to Congress and the Treasury. Its notes were instruments of lending, redeemable across a nationwide branch system designed as a flow of credit into the productive economy.
This was a conveyor belt of public credit into the productive economy.— Robert Ingraham
The Fed, he says, does the opposite. They have nothing in common.
Read the Report on Manufactures First
Beneath the mechanics is intention. If you want to attack Hamilton’s bank, read the Report on Manufactures first.
If you have not read Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, you’re unqualified to talk about the National Bank.— Robert Ingraham
The Report lays out what the credit was for: science, technology, industry, commerce, agriculture — activity that builds the nation up. Actual societal wealth flows from that commitment.
Tariffs, Paterson, and Ships
Hamilton’s tariff rose to roughly 10% in 1790. Most revenue went to the debt; a portion funded bounties and premiums for inventors and frontier technology, plus a National Manufactory as a laboratory for industry and science. In 1791 the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures built the Paterson works — later the largest manufacturing center in the United States.
Add lighthouses, the Merchant Marine, and the Coast Guard. In Washington’s eight years, registered American tonnage in foreign trade rose 384%. Nation-building for a productive future.
What Productivity Actually Is
For decades, “productivity” has meant cost-cutting and squeezing for a ledger profit. That is not productivity. Real productivity comes from discovery — electricity revolutionizing factories and farms; Ford tearing down working plants to rebuild with new technology while cutting car prices and raising wages.
Prices going down, wages going up. Now, that’s supposed to be impossible, isn’t it?— Robert Ingraham
Inflation Is About Where the Money Goes
Ingraham points to Lyndon LaRouche’s 1980 pamphlet Why Credit Can Be Greatly Expanded Without Adding to Inflation. The principle is simple:
The question is not how much money you print, the question is what do you do with the money you print?— Robert Ingraham
Pump credit into speculation and inflation is guaranteed. Direct it through a national credit system into the physical economy — capital-intensive investment in new technology and energy — and the effect can be deflationary growth.
Hamilton’s Debt Was Worse Than Ours
Adjusted for inflation and population, the per-capita debt facing Washington and Hamilton in 1789 was more than ten times today’s. It was catastrophic. Hamilton did not solve it with austerity.
One thing he did not do was go on a budget cutting spree.— Robert Ingraham
Tariffs and excise taxes stabilized the debt. Then came the real answer: unleash farming, shipping, and manufacturing and produce the way out. By the end of Washington’s presidency the debt was not gone — but the U.S. economy was booming with productive investment.
The Casino and the Creative Power
Oligarchical finance runs on linear statistics and probability theory — “really like a gambling casino,” Ingraham says. That is what was done to the American financial system after 1971. It has nothing to do with human progress.
Mankind’s role in the world, and really in the universe, is to increase our power over nature.— Robert Ingraham
We have the creative gift from God to increase that power — and through it, human progress and human happiness.
And that’s the American system of economics.— Robert Ingraham
Watch the full class — then send it to the friend who is sure the Fed is just Hamilton’s bank with a new name.
Author, historian, political organizer. Published books on American history, Dante, the global drug trade, the Anglo-Dutch Empire and National Banking. Former Editor at Executive Intelligence Review.
Founding member of the LaRouche movement in the 1960s. Former editor of LaRouche’s writings and EIR magazine. Regular host of our Saturday class series.
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