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America's original socialist party.

The Real Henry Clay: The Corrupt American Architect of Mercantilism and Protectionism

As Frederic Bastiat quipped in tongue-in-cheek fashion, "The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." Clay spent his whole career proving that aphorism, as he labored to usher in the gilded age of political centralization, oligopoly, protectionism, patronage and privilege in the United States. Edgar Lee Masters offered a telling summation of Clay's character in his book Lincoln the Man:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else. (Masters, p. 27)

Clay's American System was fully embraced by the party of Lincoln and set the stage for an exorbitant special interest lobby in Washington, D.C. Clay�s legacy lives on in the twenty-first century, and is embodied in big government, and all of its attendant perils: namely pork-barrel spending, staggering budget deficits, a bloated national debt, an inflationary monetary system, spoliation of taxpayers, national commandeering of state public policy prerogatives. Likewise, it is characterized by a colossal political appropriation of the nation�s labor, production, wealth and property by a corpulent central government. John Acton observed, "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; but still more when they are super bad and add the tendency of the certainty of corruption of authority." Henry Clay was a great man.

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