Needless to say, the politics to secure passage were rough. Unsavory deals secured elements of the plan, the details of which might dispel any romantic notion that the Founders always rose above narrow interest. These ugly arrangements often involved some otherwise admirable figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. But that discussion, rich and diverting as it would be, would go beyond the economic and financial focus here. The important thing in this matter is that Congress eventually passed the substance of Hamilton’s marvelously insightful plan. Many of the ultimate details differed. Congress, true to its by now well-established nature, added levels of infinite complexity. Still, the law committed the United States to reschedule outstanding debt at manageable rates of interest, establish a sinking fund as well as a mint, and found the First Bank of the United States. The country funded rather than repaid the debt and so stabilized its value. The United States in pretty short order embraced a uniform payments system based on the debt. It supported a financial system that provided ample credit for both day-to-day business as well as more fundamental longer-term development. The economy broadened and grew, very rapidly indeed.

What few statistics exist for the time speak loudly to the plan’s success. Federal revenues, a reasonable proxy in this case for national income, soared. In 1789, before Hamilton’s plans went into effect, federal receipts amounted to some $162,000. Five years later in 1794, and only four years after Hamilton secured his legislation, federal revenues verged on $5.4 million—a yearly growth rate of over 100 percent. Treasury revenues went from less than one three-hundredth of the country’s outstanding debt to one fifteenth of a slightly larger pool of debt. The United States was realizing its potential for everyone who lived in it, providing new jobs, incomes, and gaining independence from Europe’s imperial systems, which, incidentally, became still more exclusive as the wars of the French Revolution intensified.

AND AT base, the country remains a product of Hamilton’s system. To be sure, the United States, at least until recently, turned against tariffs in favor of free trade. It did this less in contradiction to Hamilton’s reasoning in the 1790s than because such an approach became viable as Europe abandoned its mercantile imperial systems, world trade broadened, and the U.S. economy became competitive at every level. Besides, the government over time developed sources of income other than import duties. And what is more, American industry long since has ceased to need the protection and the special encouragement it needed in that newly postcolonial time. Trump may stress tariffs as a response to what he might describe as a Chinese imperial system, but that hardly harkens back to Hamilton’s very different world.

As for finance, it still stands as Hamilton established it. At times when gold and silver were relatively plentiful, the United States declared itself on a gold standard. But even then, the money in circulation and the country’s financial and credit systems have always found their base in the government’s commitment to pay interest and principal as contracted on its debt. As long as the Treasury, in Hamilton’s words, avoided “excessive” amounts of debt, it has remained just the “blessing” he claimed it would be. Indeed, when for a brief period in the 1990s the government ran a budget surplus and talk of paying down the debt became prominent, so similar were things to Hamilton’s structure that Alan Greenspan warned how such an effort, if it went beyond the margins, would threaten the basis of the country’s financial system.

The accomplishment is nothing short of miraculous. With none of the theory and practical support available to modern policymakers, Hamilton recognized the essence of economics and finance and then, in the face of tremendous pressure, devised a plan that not only answered the country’s immediate needs but did nothing less than build a basis for domestic finance that has answered the economy’s needs since. That system, despite its many unavoidable problems and occasional failures, still projects a robust health for the foreseeable future. Hamilton and his thought even now some 230 years later, can guide anyone who would deal with this economy and its financial markets, whether they are a policy maker, commentator, theoretician or practitioner. What is more, he accomplished it all with a staff of thirty-nine and no computers.

Perhaps Hamilton’s greatest tribute came from the French statesman, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. As a person who managed to serve the pre-Revolution French monarch, the revolution itself, Napoleon and then the post-Napoleon government, this remarkable man offered this assessment: “I consider Napoleon, Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch, and if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton.”

Milton Ezrati is a contributing editor at the National Interest, an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Human Capital at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and chief economist for Vested, the New York–based communications firm. His latest book is Thirty Tomorrows: The Next Three Decades of Globalization, Demographics, and How We Will Live.