Central Banking as an Engine of Corruption

Much has been written about the famous debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the constitutionality of America's first central bank, the Bank of the United States.

In return for a redrawing of the district's border, Washington signed the Federalist's legislation creating the BUS. America's first central bank was borne of a corrupt political deal, but that particular act of political corruption pales in comparison to what Hamilton and the Federalists really had in mind.

As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Mystery of Banking, Hamilton and his political compatriots, especially defense contractor/Philadelphia congressman Robert Morris, wanted.

Upon observing this caper, Hamilton's political nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, came to understand that Hamilton was intentionally creating a system of institutionalized corruption in order to buy the political support in Congress for his party's big-government mercantilist/imperialist agenda - the very kind of political system the colonists had waged war against.

In a February 4, 1818, essay, written long after Hamilton's death in 1804, Jefferson recalled what Hamilton was up to: "Hamilton's financial system had two objects. 1st as a puzzle, to exclude popular understanding & inquiry. 2ndly, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature".

Hamilton was "So bewitched & perverted by the British example," wrote Jefferson, "As to be under thoro' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation".

Hamilton viewed "His" bank, the Bank of the United States, as being absolutely essential to his Americanized version of "The most perfect government which ever existed."
 

https://mises.org/library/central-banking-engine-corruption