Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax “constitutional conservatism” lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America’s founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution—conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today.
Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America’s founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America’s economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors’ prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial—by movements across the political spectrum—of America’s all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most.
Review of Founding Finance William Hogeland, in his new book, Founding Finance, wishes to dispel the notion that the Constitution is a document born of a set of high democratic ideals held universally by our founding fathers. Throughout the book Hogeland cites conservatives as represented by the Tea Party, and liberals as represented by the Occupy Movement, as examples of groups fighting over the interpretation of the Constitution as if arguments depended upon consistency with the divinely inspired pure reason inherent…
No National Debt, No Nation I find William Hogeland’s new book to offer a valuable perspective to the creation of the new nation and its connection to the creation of its national debt.From a review at Jacobin:[…]”We find something quite different in William Hogeland’s new book, Founding Finance. It sits alongside Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes in that it reflects on historiography as well as on its historical subjects; but where Lepore acerbically mocked Tea Party “historical…