Coming soon

This is The Hamiltonian Observer (hereafter, THO), a brand new online news and opinion journal focusing on federal, state, and local issues and events related to American political economy.

THO is a project of Blue Heron Media, Inc., intended to fill a void in our political dialog on the critical policy subjects of trade and taxation. How these policies, so interrelated, affect the very foundations of our social fabric is the main concern of this journal.

Modern pundits on both the ostensible left and the ostensible right take for granted (and largely agree on) the apparent immutable facts of both an international order based on so-called "free" trade, and the progressive national income tax policy, both of which were far from our framer's intent–the latter so much so that it required a Constitutional amendment even to become possible.

But as we at THO hope to make clear, in something of a digital revival in the pamphleteering tradition of the original Federalist Papers, sound alternatives to both can be embodied in a single national policy, namely, that of the tariff revenue system, originally instituted in 1789 to frame the "American System" as our Founders envisioned. Our modern "best and brightest" have lost the plot, in our view, and it's time the original design of our framers was revisited from first principles.

Thus conceiving of tariffs, not merely as an instrument of trade (often wielded in undisciplined ways that confound good intentions), but rather as a deliberate, coherent, and wholly sufficient national revenue system, was the unique contribution of our framers to Adam Smith's then-contemporaneous vision of economic science as applied to national political goals of creating wealth and self-sufficiency. It was designed both to define the home market and to protect its wage and price structures from the whims of foreign powers–thereby guaranteeing both national and individual independence.

It encouraged individual independency as far as it also provided for the entire national revenue without ever resorting to taxing individual or corporate income (as long as both were domestic), and kept the federal government small and well within its means. This idea is something that will not come naturally to students of modern economics and political history, because both subjects have been largely obscured by ideologically-motivated censorship that has corrupted both disciplines, from both sides of the false political divide (i.e., "left" vs. "right"). Demonstrating this is rather large assertion is another important focus of THO.

We will begin to publish essays, articles, and news features on these topics shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!