Guest Column
The Battle for America's Economic Soul: Why the Hamiltonian Debate Matters to Reading and Berks County
If you've been keeping an eye on the national political stage, you might have noticed a fascinating shift in how leaders talk about the economy. President Trump and his team have been consistently invoking a historic phrase: the American System.
The ideological shift was laid bare when Vice President J.D. Vance went on The Michael Knowles Show and said the quiet part out loud: the economics of the American right are now much more aligned with Alexander Hamilton than Milton Friedman. He went so far as to call this Hamiltonian tradition the future of American conservatism.
Almost immediately, the free-market establishment fractured. Conservative commentator Mark Levin defended Friedman, dismissing Hamilton's ideas as “socialist light.” Meanwhile, David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, countered that Hamilton was actually a free-marketeer all along. Over on the left, The Washington Post struggled to classify the shift, comparing the administration's desire to protect domestic industry to communism simply because it uses federal power.
This high-level intellectual debate might seem abstract, but it represents a fight over the very economic model that built — and then broke — Reading, Pennsylvania, and the wider Berks County region.
Reading: The Living Monument to Hamilton's Vision
To understand what Alexander Hamilton's American System actually means, you don't need to read dry eighteenth-century economic treatises. You just have to look at the history of Reading and Berks County.
The American System was built on three core pillars: high tariffs on imported goods to protect local factories from cheap foreign competition, national infrastructure — canals, roads, and railroads — to tie domestic markets together, and a strong national bank to grease the wheels of industry.
When the United States embraced this economic nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Reading became an absolute powerhouse. Protected by national trade policies, Berks County didn't just participate in the Industrial Revolution — it helped lead it.
The Reading Railroad, incorporated in 1833, became one of the most vital transportation empires in the world, moving anthracite coal to fuel American homes and factories. In neighboring Wyomissing, Ferdinand Thun and Henry Janssen established Berkshire Knitting Mills, which grew into the largest full-fashioned hosiery manufacturer on Earth, earning the region a reputation as the world's hosiery capital. Heavy industry followed: plants like Carpenter Steel, founded in 1889, and the Reading Iron Company supplied the raw muscle and metal that built American cities.
During this era, Reading served as a living proof of the Hamiltonian model. High wages, thriving neighborhoods, and impressive public infrastructure were supported by a robust and protected manufacturing economy.
The Friedman Shift and the Toll on Berks County
So, what changed?
In the late twentieth century, the American System was gradually dismantled. Policymakers from both major parties increasingly embraced Milton Friedman's free-market philosophy. They argued that tariffs should be reduced, global trade barriers eliminated, and markets — not governments — should determine where goods are produced, regardless of national borders.
The effects of that transition hit Reading and Berks County like a freight train.
Without tariff protection, local mills struggled to compete with much lower labor costs overseas. Berkshire Knitting Mills and many surrounding hosiery manufacturers eventually closed, relocated, or moved production abroad, leaving behind vacant industrial buildings. The Reading Railroad, challenged by changing transportation patterns and the decline of the domestic coal and steel industries it served, entered bankruptcy in 1971. By the early twenty-first century, Reading — once one of America's great industrial cities — was identified by U.S. Census data as among the poorest cities of its size in the nation.
Breaking Out of the False Binary
The modern debate surrounding J.D. Vance's “Hamiltonian conservatism” often becomes muddled because many commentators still view economics through a late-twentieth-century lens.
As illustrated by commentary in The Washington Post, some observers frame the discussion as offering only two choices: Milton Friedman's highly globalized free-market approach or Soviet-style state socialism. Because the populist right advocates tariffs and industrial policies to strengthen domestic manufacturing, critics sometimes characterize those policies as “socialist light.”
Alexander Hamilton, however, was not a socialist. He believed private enterprise should flourish, but also argued that markets should advance the national interest. His view was that a nation cannot remain strong, prosperous, or independent if it loses its industrial base and becomes dependent on foreign rivals for essential goods.
What a Hamiltonian Future Looks Like for Berks County
When J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, and their economic advisors advocate a return to the American System, they are proposing policies they argue resemble the economic framework that helped build Berks County.
If that policy shift succeeds, supporters envision efforts to use tariffs to encourage more manufacturing in regions like the Rust Belt, invest in domestic supply chains, steel production, and advanced manufacturing, and rebuild local economies through stable, family-supporting blue-collar jobs instead of relying primarily on service-sector and retail employment.
Whether one calls it populist nationalism, Hamiltonian conservatism, or the American System, supporters argue it draws on a long-standing American economic tradition rather than introducing an entirely new theory.
For Reading, this debate is more than an intellectual disagreement taking place in Washington. It touches directly on the economic philosophy that shaped the city's rise, influenced its decline, and could play a role in discussions about its future. Whether the renewed emphasis on industrial policy ultimately succeeds remains to be seen, but for communities like Reading and Berks County, the stakes are far more than theoretical.