The American System

Before it was a policy, it was a covenant.

Man was made in the image of a Maker - made to produce, not to be extracted from. That is where this book begins, and it follows that directive from Genesis, read through the Westminster Standards, to the founding of the American Republic.

Hamilton laid three of its pillars before Congress in 1790 and 1791: the tariff, the sovereign credit and internal improvements. The fourth, the producing class that carries them, he counted and never made a pillar. This book does. Clay named it the American System. Lincoln reforged it, Garfield held the protective principle through the years of reduction, and McKinley carried its first pillar, the tariff, to its height.

Then it came apart. The book follows the collapse from the 1913 cleavage through the Federal Reserve's conduct in 1929 and, as its own minutes record it, in October 1931, the ruin of the farm belt, and the Dust Bowl - a consequence, not a cause. It weighs Roosevelt's partial Jubilee, Kennedy's move toward the System, and the arithmetic that ran out on August 15, 1971, and it closes on the tariff's return and the directive still unfinished.

The argument rests on documents read in the original - a Report laid before Congress, a tariff schedule as enacted, a minute of the Federal Reserve Board. Where a claim rests on anything less than the original, the page says so.

For Christian readers who want the economic order measured against Scripture, and for anyone who suspects the American economy was built to a design that was later taken apart.

The American System is Volume II of The American Sovereignty Trilogy, with Outside the Gates (Volume I) and The Donroe Doctrine (Volume III). All three are available now.