What Alexander Hamilton Would Make of Washington’s Stake in Intel

by Frank Holmes of U.S. Global Investors, 8/4/26

alex-hamilton

In January 1790, the House of Representatives put a simple question to its new Treasury Secretary: what should America make for itself? Alexander Hamilton took almost two years to answer.

He was 36, an immigrant orphan from the Caribbean island of Nevis who had talked his way into King’s College and then into George Washington’s inner circle. His Report on the Subject of Manufactures,delivered December 5, 1791, was the longest of the four great reports he wrote for Congress… and the one Congress mostly ignored.

Hamilton’s argument was that a country that can’t make the things it needs isn’t fully a country. “The independence and security of a Country,” he wrote, “appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures.”

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The first factory in the U.S., a water-powered cotton mill, had yet to open in Rhode Island, so Hamilton wasn’t being sentimental about factories. Instead, he was thinking about national supply. At the time, the United States had to buy its muskets, wool and gunpowder from the same empire it had just finished fighting. Hamilton wanted the new republic to be, in his words, “independent on foreign nations, for military and other essential supplies.”

Hamilton Is Having a Moment

At Davos this past January, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer credited Hamilton as the intellectual father of the Trump administration’s trade policy.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who holds the job Hamilton invented, has said the same, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that national and economic security “begins with the capacity to build, invest, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals.”

Both Greer and Bessent, not to mention Trump himself, have invoked Hamilton as a basis for the administration’s tariff policy. Hamilton, though, was only moderately supportive of tariffs, believing (rightfully so) they would raise consumer prices. He was much more supportive of “bounties,” or what we’d call direct subsidies today.

Congress passed Hamilton’s tariffs but ignored the subsidies. I bring this up because the industrial policy we have in 2026 doesn’t resemble what Hamilton proposed.