The result was Hamilton's famous "Report on Manufactures," which proposed using tariffs and subsidies to grow the industry of our young republic.
While controversial at the time, Hamilton's report eventually became the playbook for 200 years of trade policy that made the United States the greatest industrial powerhouse the world has ever seen.
And then everything changed.
Starting in the 1990s, Washington began embracing a new school of thought about how to grow the wealth of nations. This new school of thought, pushed by Wall Street and corporate America, said that so-called "free-trade" deals were the best and fastest way to riches.
All free-trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA really did, though, was take the most important part of our economy -- manufacturing -- and send it overseas. According to Public Citizen, NAFTA alone led to a net loss of over 1 million jobs.
As a result of all this, manufacturing now makes up just around 12 percent of our GDP, a far cry from the 1950s, when it made up almost 30 percent of our GDP.
This is about as bad as it gets.
Without a strong manufacturing base, no great power can survive as a great power. It will instead become dependent on foreign goods and the financial world to create wealth out of thin air -- a recipe for economic disaster after economic disaster.
And without strong manufacturing jobs that actually create things, the middle class will wither and die, just as it has started to do here in the US over the past few decades.
This is why the current debate over the TPP and fast-tracking is such a big deal.
Two decades of free-trade deals have eviscerated the middle class and bloodied the "American dream."
If President Obama goes ahead and signs us onto another free-trade deal, especially one as destructive as the TPP, that will be like tying a cement block to the feet of a drowning man.
It will spell the end of the US middle class, and, for that matter, the vision of the United States that Alexander Hamilton first put forward more than 200 years ago.
So call your members of Congress today and tell them to "just say no" to the SHAFTA/TPP and President Obama's request for fast-tracking powers.
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