Lessons from Colonial America

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Lessons from Colonial America

For all the profound changes in Economic Policy that have taken place in the centuries after the establishment of the thirteen colonies and their independence, one must regularly revisit history through the lens of Economics to understand what has worked and what hasn’t.

Since the inception of any economic structure in the British North American Colonies, it became apparent each region would inevitably specialize in the production of certain goods. Through the years immediately following the first settlements –as population nearly doubled every 25 years-, New England emerged as a shipbuilding prowess, the Carolinas and Virginia gave a completely new center to economic activity around Tobacco, and the colonies around New York provided a vital commercial supply of furs, among others. It would be this structure of state-specialization that assured America would have the necessary capacity to grow in population and economic output.

Since President Barack Obama took his oath of office in January 2009, he –and his Democratic collaborators in State Legislatures and in Congress- have made countless efforts to eradicate the above-explained concept of Economic Federalism and instead transform it into a Presidential autocracy. The series of lawless acts signed by President Obama disguised as Executive Acts have seriously crippled the notion of state autonomy, his socialist-based Education and Healthcare projects have sought to unify America’s socio-economic structure around an all-mighty nanny state; even more worrying, his cronyism has focused (yet failed) on subjugating states financially to the will of the Federal Government through subsidies and entitlements.

It is surely the abandonment of this federalist system our founders envisioned that has provided us with an economically weakened America and a distorted democracy. It is perhaps time for us to look back to Colonial America and take note, for their legacy of state economic and social autonomy might be the only key to our salvation. It is necessary for our next leaders to understand the importance of limiting the scope of the Federal Government, for its intromission only guarantees the inevitable failure of those states that surrender to its bribery. 

“It is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor… It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all”. – Thomas Jefferson