Search results for ""Author Jay Cost""

Cronyism is a serious problem in the United States, but unfortunately it is still not very well understood. In this new essay, Jay Cost explains what it is, and why we should be so worried about it. By mingling private and public interests, cronyism costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year and threatens to transform our republic into an oligarchy, where the rich dominate the middle class. Worse, modern cronyism has become embedded into the laws themselves, so politicians in Washington assume that such corruption is just the way things should be. To confront the dangers of cronyism, reformers need to think outside the box, paying special attention to how the political process functions.

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An incisive account of the tumultuous relationship between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and of the origins of our wealthy yet highly unequal nationIn the history of American politics there are few stories as enigmatic as that of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's bitterly personal falling out. Together they helped bring the Constitution into being, yet soon after the new republic was born they broke over the meaning of its founding document. Hamilton emphasized economic growth, Madison the importance of republican principles.Jay Cost is the first to argue that both men were right--and that their quarrel reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the American experiment. He shows that each man in his own way came to accept corruption as a necessary cost of growth. The Price of Greatness reveals the trade-off that made the United States the richest nation in human history, and that continues to fracture our politics to this day.

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After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin's response: "A Republic--if you can keep it." This book argues: we couldn't keep it. A true republic privileges the common interest above the special interests. To do this, our Constitution established an elaborate system of checks and balances that separates power among the branches of government, and places them in conflict with one another. The Framers believed that this would keep grasping, covetous factions from acquiring enough power to dominate government. Instead, only the people would rule. Proper institutional design is essential to this system. Each branch must manage responsibly the powers it is granted, as well as rebuke the other branches when they go astray. This is where subsequent generations have run into trouble: we have overloaded our government with more power than it can handle. The Constitution's checks and balances have broken down because the institutions created in 1787 cannot exercise responsibly the powers of our sprawling, immense twenty-first century government. The result is the triumph of special interests over the common interest. James Madison called this factionalism. We know it as political corruption. Corruption today is so widespread that our government is not so much a republic, but rather a special interest democracy. Everybody may participate, yes, but the contours of public policy depend not so much on the common good, but rather the push-and-pull of the various interest groups encamped in Washington, DC.

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How do you solve a problem like James Madison? The fourth president is one of the most confounding figures in early American history -- his political trajectory seems almost intentionally inconsistent. He was both for and against a strong federal government. He wrote about the dangers of political parties in the Federalist papers and then helped to found the Republican party just a few years later. And though he has frequently been celebrated as the "father of the constitution," his contributions to our founding document were subtler than many have supposed. This so-called "Madison problem" has occupied scholars for ages.Previous biographies have made sense of Madison's mixed record by breaking his life into discrete periods. But this approach falls short. Madison was, of course, a single person -- a brilliant thinker whose life's work was to forge a stronger Union around principles of limited government, individual rights, and above all, justice. As Jay Cost argues in this incisive new biography, we cannot comprehend Madison's legacy without understanding him as a working politician. We tend to focus on his accomplishments as a statesman and theorist -- but the same ideals that guided his thinking in these arenas shaped his practice of politics, where they were arguably more influential. Indeed, Madison was the original American politician. Whereas other founders split their time between politics and other vocations, Madison dedicated himself singularly to the work of politics and ultimately developed it into a distinctly American idiom.Bringing together the full range of his intellectual life, Cost shows us Madison as we've never seen him before: not as a man with uncertain opinions and inconstant views -- but as a coherent and unified thinker, a skilled strategist, and a key contributor to the ideals that have shaped our history. He was, in short, the first American politician.

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