Federalist No. 35 is an essay by Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...

, the thirty-fifth of the Federalist Papers

Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution. Seventy-seven of the essays were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788...

. It was published on January 5, 1788 under the pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 Publius, the name under which all the Federalist Papers were published. This is the sixth of seven essays by Hamilton on the controversial issue of taxation. It is titled, "The Same Subject Continued: Concerning the General Power of Taxation."

Summary

In this essay, Hamilton argues that if the federal government's powers of taxation were confined to certain objects, it would place strain on those objects, especially in times of great need. This, he says, is dangerous to the economy

Economy

An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...

as well as the government's source of revenue. In the interest of revenue itself, the government would be prevented from exceeding limits on articles, as it would destroy the market for that article. He later argues against a proposal that there should be a representative from each class of the economy. He says that the economy is far too interconnected to necessitate such a system.

Hamilton proposes that there are two evils that would result from the certain confinement of taxation in the Union - one being the oppression of particular types of industry and the other one being the unequal distribution of the taxes, among different states and among people.

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