Hamilton’s program was never focused upon specie outflow prevention or specie inflow promotion as was the intent of mercantilism.
Wrong. Hamilton's reports are full of dire warnings about the "distressing drains on our specie" and the how we must stop the "money of foreigners," brought in by debt finance, from being "reexported to defray the expense of an extraordinary consumption of foreign luxury."
His reports were never intended to “refute” Smith but to provide a rationale for funding the government and developing the economy.
Also wrong. Extensive textual analysis has been conducted on the early drafts of Hamilton's reports prepared by Tench Coxe, revealing direct textual references to the Wealth of Nations that were later trimmed so as to make them less overt.
Among the first true economic studies they showed his genius for gathering of facts and data never before attempted in this nation
Also wrong. There is almost zero "data" in the Treasury reports, unless you count a simple cursory listing of the current debt in the Report on Public Credit and a few recommended tariff rates and subsidies in the Report on Manufactures. It's all his own theoretical arguments, and rather poor ones when evaluated through the lens of modern free market economics. In fact, the Treasury Department records under Hamilton are embarrassingly sparse and mark the beginning of a statistical "dark age" for economic historians from roughly 1789 to 1816, during which trade and commercial records were not well kept, were almost never reported, and now have to be estimated using statistical approximations from private sources such as Blodget's "Economica" and Pitkin's "Statistical View" of American commerce. There are even studies by modern academics devoted to the sole purpose of reconstructing the missing years of commercial data starting at the outset of Hamilton's reign.
Hong Kong was not a nation and developed nothing new. It was a colony.
Also wrong. Hong Kong went from an economic backwater with almost no population and ZERO natural resources in an area smaller than Washington, DC at the end of WWII to one of the largest and most vibrant commercial centers in the world in barely three decades. It did so due to an intentional laissez-faire economic policy. And its "colony" status put it in the crosshairs of an immeasurably greater threat than anything colonial America ever faced: Maoist China sitting right on its front doorstep. During the peak of the Cold War, Hong Kong even had to keep an airforce on the runway with engines running 24/7 in preparation for emergency takeoff because they had only minutes to get in the air if China decided to invade. Hamilton never even dreamed of a threat that real or that immediate from a hostile foreign power, though he certainly tried to instigate an unnecessary war with at least one of them.
Obviously Hamilton understood the relation between the quantity of specie and the health of the domestic economy. His program was designed to bring about the inflow of such through the purchase of US debt. And it worked admirably making US debt as strong as ANY nation’s and stronger than gold itself.
His genius essentially created a money supply by capitalizing the nation’s word. Jefferson/Madison policy would have been a disaster. BUT his policy never was FOCUSED upon specie outflow and never but the policies in place elsewhere to stop it. Concern or “dire warnings” notwithstanding.
Hamilton’s goal was strengthening the Union and making possible the survival of the new nation not refutation of Adam Smith.
Hamilton undertook an extensive and in depth study of the US economy and received reports from all over the nation as a part of that, the first such attempt ever made. Of course, that data was not IN THE REPORT. What a ridiculous idea that would have been.
Treasury records doubtless suffered from having our capital in three different places AND being burned down. But the fact remains that our greatest secretary of the treasury and one of the other greatest, Hamilton and Gallatin were in charge for much of the “dark age” you referenced. It is hardly surprising or scandalous that a new nation would have gaps in its records.
Hong Kong was not a nation but was, as I said, a COLONY. Just as we had COLONIES on our doorstep which Hamilton had to consider indeed we were surrounded by them. France’s plan to send an army to Louisiana was destroyed by the yellow fever which decimated it attempting to put down the slave revolt in Haiti. It was only after that that Napoleon gave up on his intention to re-establish France’s new world empire and decided to dump Louisiana so that the US would have to fight Britain for it not France. We faced a hostile and VERY dynamic world power not like the essentially defense-minded China facing Hong Kong, which was after all Chinese territory.