Speaker 1: For most of human history, wealth was presumed to be finite.
Speaker 1: Consider a boy in a playground with ten marbles. How
Speaker 1: can he get more? There's only one possibility. He has
Speaker 1: to take someone else's marbles. Until relatively recently, wealth was
Speaker 1: mostly in land, and the only way to get more
Speaker 1: land was to take it. Conquest was the natural mode
Speaker 1: of human acquisition, and that's how most countries evolved and
Speaker 1: grew through force and conquest. The American Revolution was motivated
Speaker 1: in large part by resistance to this old way of
Speaker 1: doing things. To put it clearly, the colonists didn't like
Speaker 1: the idea that the English Crown could take their money
Speaker 1: or property without their consent, no taxation, without representation, they protested. Still,
Speaker 1: the control of money and property was only part of
Speaker 1: the picture. The bigger challenge would be this, could the
Speaker 1: New world find a better alternative to the old world's
Speaker 1: conquest and seizure model. Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasurer of
Speaker 1: the United States, had the answer. Under his brilliant stewardship,
Speaker 1: the new nation developed a new concept of wealth creation
Speaker 1: capitalism based on innovation, invention, and enterprise, and it would
Speaker 1: be available to every citizen from any background with the
Speaker 1: willingness to work for it. America could get more marbles
Speaker 1: without seizing anyone's marbles. We would just make new ones. True.
Speaker 1: Later in American history, the government seized Indian Land, but
Speaker 1: that wasn't Hamilton's idea. And obviously there were inventors and
Speaker 1: merchants around before America. But America's the first society to
Speaker 1: be based on invention and trade. America, as Carl Marx
Speaker 1: later understood, is the capitalist society par excellence. Hamilton was
Speaker 1: the man who made it so. Indeed, Hamilton's own life
Speaker 1: refine the upward mobility he wanted to be a defining
Speaker 1: characteristic of the new nation. Born on the small Caribbean
Speaker 1: island of Nevis, he was orphaned at twelve. By fourteen,
Speaker 1: he was running a shipping company for a local merchant.
Speaker 1: At age twenty, he made his way to New York.
Speaker 1: Soon thereafter, he fully embraced the revolutionary cause. By twenty three,
Speaker 1: he was George Washington's most trusted aid. At thirty four,
Speaker 1: he was running the US Treasury, the largest apartment by
Speaker 1: far of the new government. In contrast to Hamilton, the
Speaker 1: other leading founders, Washington, Jefferson Madison, were Virginia farmers. If
Speaker 1: it were up to them, America would have been set
Speaker 1: up as a network of farming communities, with towns conceived
Speaker 1: as places where agricultural produce was bought and sold. It
Speaker 1: was Hamilton who laid the groundwork for America to become
Speaker 1: a prosperous urban, industrial, commercial society. Hamilton and envisioned America
Speaker 1: as a nation whose nuclei would be cities centers of
Speaker 1: vigorous invention, innovation, and trade, with new types of people entrepreneurs, mechanics, financiers, salesmen,
Speaker 1: and so on, all working to enjoy the quote bleasing
Speaker 1: reward of their toils. But how to create such a society?
Speaker 1: That was the question. How to make New York, which
Speaker 1: was then a modest town, into the New York City
Speaker 1: we know today, a flourishing center of finance, commerce, publishing,
Speaker 1: and the arts. Coming from the islands of the West Indies,
Speaker 1: where the buying and selling of human beings was the
Speaker 1: defining feature of the economic system, Hamilton well understood how
Speaker 1: easily the passion for conquest control over other human beings
Speaker 1: could overwhelm man's better nature. Yes, slavery was a lamentable
Speaker 1: feature of the new Country. The question for the pragmatic
Speaker 1: Hamilton was how to get rid of it. Not immediately
Speaker 1: that was impossible, but eventually inevitably. In his mind, there
Speaker 1: was only one way, make it easy as possible for
Speaker 1: as many people as possible to become as prosperous as possible.
Speaker 1: This would happen through the myriad ways of commerce. E
Speaker 1: Commerce of this sort, Hamilton knew, would require strong central
Speaker 1: government not to curb freedom, but to protect it. The
Speaker 1: elaborate system of rights and contracts on which capitalism is
Speaker 1: based requires the government to be the neutral arbiter of
Speaker 1: the disputes that inevitably arise. A weak central government of
Speaker 1: the sort and vision by Jefferson would not be up
Speaker 1: to that challenge. To say that these two intellectual giants
Speaker 1: butted heads over this question would be an understatement. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: Hamilton's vision prevailed. That vision included one more crucial component,
Speaker 1: one that's easily overlooked. Patent protection for inventors and innovators.
Speaker 1: Article one, Section eight of the US Constitution gives Congress
Speaker 1: the power to quote promote the progress of science and
Speaker 1: useful arts by securing or limited times to authors and
Speaker 1: inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
Speaker 1: end quote. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln would
Speaker 1: note that this right the only right listed in the
Speaker 1: original Constitution prior to the addition of the The Bill
Speaker 1: of Rights accelerated the economic development of the United States
Speaker 1: by adding quote the fuel of interest to the fire
Speaker 1: of genius in the discovery and production of new and
Speaker 1: useful things. It was no accident that within a matter
Speaker 1: of decades the United States became the most prosperous nation
Speaker 1: in world history. It's no accident because Alexander Hamilton was
Speaker 1: there at the founding, the man who understood that, thanks
Speaker 1: to capitalism, you don't have to take anyone else's marbles
Speaker 1: to get more marbles of your own.