Thomas Jefferson's Free-Market Economics

By Murray N. Rothbard

 

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) had been a friend and admirer of the philosophes and ideologues since the 1780s when he served as minister to France. When the ideologues achieved some political power in the consular years of Napoleon, Jefferson was made a member of the "brain trust" Institut National in 1801. The ideologues — Cabanis, DuPont, Volney, Say, and de Tracy — all sent Jefferson their manuscripts and received encouragement in return. After he finished the Commentary on Montesquieu, de Tracy sent the manuscript to Jefferson and asked him to have it translated into English. Jefferson enthusiastically translated some of it himself, and then had the translation finished and published by the Philadelphia newspaper publisher William Duane. In this way, the Commentary appeared in English (1811), eight years before it could be published in France. When Jefferson sent the published translation to de Tracy, the delighted philosopher was inspired to finish his Traité de la volonté and sent it quickly to Jefferson, urging him to translate that volume.

 

Jefferson was highly enthusiastic about the Traité. Even though he himself had done much to prepare the way for war with Great Britain in 1812, Jefferson was disillusioned by the public debt, high taxation, government spending, flood of paper money, and burgeoning of privileged bank monopolies that accompanied the war. He had concluded that his beloved Democratic-Republican Party had actually adopted the economic policies of the despised Hamiltonian federalists, and de Tracy's bitter attack on these policies prodded Jefferson to try to get the Traité translated into English. Jefferson gave the new manuscript to Duane again, but the latter went bankrupt, and Jefferson then revised the faulty English translation Duane had commissioned. Finally, the translation was published as the Treatise on Political Economy, in 1818.

 

Former President John Adams, whose ultra-hard-money and 100 percent-specie-banking views were close to Jefferson's, hailed the de Tracy Treatise as the best book on economics yet published. He particularly… (Read more) ​

 

Source: Mises.org