Public credit
The show’s substantive treatment of Hamilton is in the episode with Thomas Fleming George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Fleming described the plan to repay Congress’s wartime bills of credit at face value, funded through a new Bank of the United States whose stock brought the country’s wealthy into the government’s camp: “this was the key thing that brought all of the wealthy men in the country into the government—became supporters of the government. … And they didn’t try to invest their money in Britain or other countries; they invested it in the United States.” His summary of the result: when Washington took office “the credit of the United States in the world was zero minus … In three and a half or four years, our credit rating, thanks to Hamilton and Washington, was the highest in the world.”
Zadek’s contribution was the objection: “While Hamilton certainly built up our what I’ll call credit rating, there was some discussion that he opened up the country maybe to the first insider trading because his buddies, in anticipation of Hamilton backing all of these seemed-to-be worthless obligations, they bought this up from mostly from veterans who were given script instead of their paychecks.” Fleming answered that most of the paper had passed through several hands by 1790 and that tracing original holders was impossible; Jefferson and Madison had argued for compensating them. The same episode records Washington’s rule for such decisions, in Fleming’s telling: “we must take men as they are, not as we wish them to be.”
The question resurfaces as the opening of the insider-trading episode with Don Boudreaux, where Zadek asks who the first insider trader in American history was Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
The weakest branch
In the episodes on the courts, Hamilton is cited for the proposition that the judiciary was meant to be weak. Zadek’s version: “Alexander Hamilton, I believe, observed that the court—I think it was Hamilton—is the weakest branch of government because it has no army, no police force to enforce its rulings, no power of the purse” Reviewing Judicial Review (2020). Ilan Wurman gave the Anti-Federalists the better of that exchange: they predicted “that the judiciary will slowly accrete power to itself through precedents and judicial review,” and Hamilton’s reply that judges have “the power of judgment … not will or force” has not held up The Conservative Constitution (2021). Judge Jeffrey Sutton cited Federalist 78 for the origin of life tenure, in response to legislatures intimidating judges — a lesson, he noted, that only the federal courts and Rhode Island fully adopted Who Decides? (2022).
Against the Jeffersonians
Chris Edwards framed the 1790s as a fight between “Hamilton and the big government sort of faction and Jefferson and Madison and the smaller government faction,” with Hamilton favouring internal taxes and the Jeffersonians import duties — a fight settled, for a time, by the election of 1800 Debt & Taxes (2021).