🤑 | The Not So Invisible Hand

Puppets and their masters. Dusting off lessons from history and Hamilton.

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“The encouragement of manufactures is the surest means of augmenting the national wealth and securing the national independence.” — Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 1791

In high school, somewhere between the periodic table and the causes of World War I, we were instructed about how capitalism works. Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher, published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The takeaway was: when individuals pursue their own self-interest in a free market, an invisible hand guides those selfish impulses toward outcomes that benefit everyone. Supply and demand find each other. Prices balance themselves. Nobody needs to be in charge because the system regulates itself. Elegant, intuitive and almost poetic.

What most of us never thought about was the invisible hand concept. Where did it reside? Whose interests it was serving? And why the man who wrote the theory happened to be a British subject employed by a British university in the same year that thirteen American colonies declared independence from the British Empire.

Two Men, Two Visions

Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton were contemporaries who looked at the same world and reached opposite conclusions.

Smith proposed to trust the market, remove government interference and allow capital to flow freely. Prosperity would be measured by what goods cost at the point of purchase. Free trade benefits everyone because each country produces what it does best and trades for the rest.

Hamilton’s perspective was that markets are a tool and tools require a craftsman. A young nation competing against established industrial powers cannot prosper under a system designed by and for those powers. Protect your infant industries. Build national banking. Invest in infrastructure. Measure prosperity not at the checkout counter but at the factory gate. Productive capacity is power and power is sovereignty.

Smith’s framework was adopted by the British Empire and exported to every nation it traded with, competed against or controlled. Hamilton’s framework built the United States into the greatest industrial power in human history and the victor of WWII. Then America forgot Hamilton, adopted Smith, and spent forty years watching its factories go dark in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania while being told that cheaper goods at Walmart were proof the system was working.

At the Reagan Economic Forum last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said it plainly: we substituted efficiency for resilience, consumption for production, and told ourselves the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront. A sitting Treasury Secretary declaring the high school economics lesson officially over.

What the Textbook Left Out

Free trade sounds neutral but it has never been such. Nations advocating for it most aggressively have always been the ones with the most to gain from other nations opening their markets. Britain in 1776 was the world’s dominant naval and manufacturing power. Telling every other nation to remove trade barriers was not a philosophical position. It was a competitive strategy dressed in philosophical language.

The nations that ignored Smith and followed Hamilton — Germany, Japan, South Korea and eventually China — built industrial powerhouses behind protective tariff walls and only adopted free trade rhetoric after they had already won the manufacturing competition. Hamilton knew this would happen. He said so in his 1791 Report on Manufactures. America, he argued, could not prosper under a system designed by the power it had just fought a war to escape.

Two hundred and thirty five years later, Jamie Dimon sat on Fox News and confessed that outsourcing American manufacturing was a mistake. Dimon — the man whose bank profited enormously from the financialization that replaced factory jobs with financial products and measured national health by stock indices rather than factory output.

The invisible hand guided capital somewhere very specific. Away from the factory floors of the American Midwest and toward the financial centers that profit from moving money rather than making things. Toward the City of London’s offshore banking network, the Isle of Man front companies, the petrodollar system that extracted a terror premium from every barrel of oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Toward the rules-based order that turned out to be London’s rules, written to serve globalist elite interests, enforced through institutions that called themselves neutral while producing outcomes that were anything but.

The invisible hand was never invisible. It resides in the Square Mile, the City of London, EC2.

The Rebrand That Will Fail

This week Carney, Blair and Dimon all stood up and began speaking Hamiltonian language. Canada strong. Labor growth. America’s industrial might. They have recognized that Trump’s system is winning and theirs is losing.

But you cannot apply Hamilton’s principles while maintaining Smith’s underlying philosophy. You cannot rebuild the factory gate while your capital is still guided by the invisible hand toward the offshore network that has been extracting value from nations for two centuries. The rebrand fails because the principle is the point. And their principles have not changed.

What Hamilton Knew

Hamilton’s insight was not primarily economic. It was strategic. A nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship or refine what it needs has surrendered its sovereignty to whoever can. It is why the same administration that blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, placed Venezuelan oil under American influence and walked Jensen Huang off Air Force One in Beijing is operating from a single coherent principle your high school economics class was never designed to teach you.

Productive capacity is power. The invisible hand has an address. And the man who just interrupted its operation has been thinking about this since 1987, when he took out a newspaper advertisement to say so as a private citizen with no political office and no obligation to say anything at all.

The high school lesson is over. Hamilton is back. And the hand was never invisible — it just preferred that you thought it was.

"A nation that cannot feed, fuel, or defend itself is not truly sovereign." — Mark Carney, May 28, 2026

Heavenly Father,

We pray for the wisdom to see through the language of neutrality to the interests it serves. We pray for an awakened, self-educating, and discerning population who is compelled to see the bigger picture and not the headline of the day.

We pray for the statesmen who are governing from principle rather than from poll numbers. Give them time, results and the cover to finish what they started.

We pray with specific and personal gratitude for a country that produced Alexander Hamilton and America’s founding fathers. May our generation have the courage, the wisdom and the humility to remember that productive capacity without moral purpose is just a different kind of empire.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.

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For a more visceral take on the British Empire: