Monday roundup

Will probably have a longer, more singularly focused post or two later today, but I've run across some stuff so far this morning that is definitely recommendation worthy.

Herewith:

Jay Cost at NRO has a piece on how Revolutionary War veterans fared as the years went by. Short answer: not well.

After the war, the national government did not have the cash to pay the troops, because it lacked the power to tax. It was dependent on requisitions from the states, which were not forthcoming. The soldiers were therefore paid in debt certificates, commonly known as Pierce Notes. The problem was that nobody really believed that the government would ever actually pay back the Pierce Notes in hard currency. Lacking a taxing power, how could it? So veterans, desperately in need of cash, began selling their certificates in 1784.

This created a glut of certificates, which drove the value down to less than 20 cents on the dollar, and the certificates tended to migrate into the hands of a relatively small number of eastern speculators. Fast forward to 1790. The new Constitution was established, the government had implemented a national tax, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was ready to make provisions for repayment of the national debt. Who was to benefit? Not the soldiers who had sold their certificates, at least not under Hamilton’s scheme. Instead, most of the bounty went to the speculators who had bought the certificates and now stood to reap a windfall profit.

Once the Constitution became the law of the land and the government gave itself the power to tax, the question of how to make this situation right arose. That moment marked a significant rift between Hamilton and my main man, James Madison. With Hamilton at the helm of the Treasury, there was still a dearth of a plan to compensate these men.

Madison, who had not served in combat, was outraged by this. It was the first moment he and Hamilton really broke on an important matter of public policy. He proposed to split the repayment equally between the speculators and the veterans. Unfortunately, this was totally impractical — the government lacked the resources to figure out who should be paid what. Moreover, imposing such a massive haircut on public creditors would have had extremely bad effects on the economy. Madison’s proposal went down to a lopsided defeat, and rightly so. But the fact remains that the Revolutionary War veterans never got the support they deserved. Forget about the Veterans Affairs Administration — that did not exist. Forget about the kinds of pensions that the Civil War veterans enjoyed — they reaped no such bounty. In fact, the Revolutionary War veterans did not even get paid the salary they were promised. Granted, some of them were taken care of by their states, including with generous options on land in the West. But compared with today’s veterans, Revolutionary War veterans were simply taken for granted. 

Italy may be the seat of Christianity's institutional power, but something is deeply wrong with its culture. Silvio Berlusconi, a sybarite that at least rivals any of the Americans recently so confirmed, is still the most powerful figure in the Forza Italia party, and has considerable backing for a return to active political participation.

Jed Babbin, writing at The American Spectator, says there are three festering wounds that 2016 inflicted on America: the "Russian dossier," the Uranium One scandal, and the Hillary Clinton-Huma Abedin mishandling of classified information. He says the common factor to all three is James Comey. As LITD has said before, Comey is one heck of an enigmatic figure. It looks like he's not only been vulnerable to moral compromise, but that he's succumbed. But it's incongruous with his demeanor. He comes across as an earnest, mild-mannered career prosecutor trying to do the right thing. Babbin's piece seems to confirm for me the LITD thesis: that one or more players in these three developments has leaned on him, hard.

The determination of Spain's central government seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of the Catalonia independence push.

Joanna Weiss at Politico examines why it is that network television sitcoms and dramas rarely feature non-rich, or at least economically comfortable, people.