[Wallace T.]

The Founders, even the more authoritarian ones like Hamilton, favored a limited role for the Federal government, primarily foreign affairs and defense, including nonintervention in overseas conflicts where the U.S. was not attacked, a gold and silver backed currency, an unregulated market economy, and no charity except through churches and private individuals. The Founders were far closer to what we would call today libertarians than conservatives, who for te most part would have fit in well with the liberals of the Kennedy-Johnson days than with the Founders or even the conservatives of that time, of the Taft-Goldwater stripe.