Brahmin Capitalism

Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States

“…See also the debate over classification in Boston between David A. Wells (in favor of taxing real estate only) and Thomas Hill, described in Maggor (2017), in particular pp. 74-95.…”

Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

“…65 In addition to the "incredible fragmentation of existing infrastructure," the nation's "regionally unbalanced financial system," and the persistence of "capacious government power on the state and local levels," the attempt to integrate new western states into the national economy, Maggor argues, "energized a proliferation of subnational political units, each of them in charge of large swaths of policy that the federal government had limited capacity to attend to." 66 In defiance of both the federal government and the interests of eastern capital, western settlers endeavored to frame their own constitutions in ways that reflected their own conceptions of access to resources, patterns of local governance, and spatial politics. They won meaningful concessions, resulting in the survival of "lasting pockets of local power and state-level autonomy within the federal structure of American politics … structural wrinkles in what once appeared to be the unchallenged blanket authority of the federal government."…”

“…67 The institutional environment of American federalism, in short, posed "enormous entrepreneurial, political, and ideological challenges" to the consolidation of a national market, challenges that were "overcome strenuously and always incompletely." 68 Even apparently successful attempts to work in concert across multiple layers of government revealed the complexity of the federal system. Historians have long been aware that cooperation between state and national governments, in the form of state subsidies and matching grants, had been a boon to would-be state-builders even before the intergovernmental innovations of the New Deal.…”