EP40 · Society · first published 2020-10-17
How the US federation was built | Manolis Huuki | Negotiator 40
Huuki Show host and political history student Manolis Huuki walks through the birth of the American federation: taxation without representation, the Articles of Confederation, the quarrel between federalists and anti-federalists, the three-fifths compromise and the federal debt that took off after the Civil War. The second half applies all of it to the European Union. The sharpest observation is numerical: US federal and state government together run at around 30 per cent of GDP, while Finland alone is at 42 — so copying a Hamiltonian moment would mean moving taxes to Brussels and cutting the rate, not building a new layer on top.
How the US federation was built | Manolis Huuki
Summary: In episode 40 of the Negotiator channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Manolis Huuki, host of the Huuki Show, who studies political history at the University of Turku and spent the spring on exchange in the United States. The episode is a “federation for dummies” tour of how the American federal state came into being and evolved — from taxation without representation through the Articles of Confederation, the federalist and anti-federalist quarrel, the three-fifths compromise, the Civil War and the federal debt. The second half turns the frame on the European Union, and the question that Finland’s “Hamiltonian moment” commentary never addressed comes to the fore: the tax rates.
The Socrates of Kannus
The episode opens lightly. Huuki comes from Kannus in Central Ostrobothnia, which he describes as a small but stubborn region whose best-known son is Esko Aho — once nicknamed the Kennedy of Kannus. Miettinen proposes that Huuki become the Socrates of Kannus, and Huuki accepts with his own justification: Socrates was in a sense the world’s first troll, who developed the art of debate and sought truth — but since people run on emotion rather than reason, enough angry Athenians gathered to demand his death. After the cup of poison the citizens came to regret it and some of the accusers were exiled, so Socrates had the last laugh from beyond the grave. Huuki says he likes to argue by reason himself, and has noticed that emotional people get heated by it.
Huuki’s father came from the Greek island of Kos in the Dodecanese, his mother from Finland. As an aside he tells a story from Greece’s 2012 snap elections: a relative was asked to serve as finance minister in the caretaker government, and the reaction on Kos was that anyone taking the job would have a heart attack within a month.
Taxation without representation, and the war of independence
The subject proper begins from the basic setup: the United States was born precisely out of taxation and the question of who pays and whose voice is heard. The thirteen colonies were British, with no vote in the British parliament even though they paid taxes to the mother country. The Boston Tea Party in the 1770s was a formal rebellion, and matters ran out of hand from the battle of Lexington onward, when local militias began to fight the crown’s troops.
The genie could not be put back in the bottle, Huuki says: it was no longer a matter of presenting grievances and seeking a vote in parliament, but of concluding that “we would be better off on our own”. Behind it stood John Locke and the idea of fundamental human liberties, which sat badly with a king.
From confederation to federation
After the war a loose union emerged: thirteen effectively independent colonies were governed under the Articles of Confederation. In the 1790s and the first years of the 1800s the educated veterans of the war concluded that this was not enough — different states had, among other things, different currencies. External threat sped the decision along: to the south the Kingdom of Spain held Florida, to the north Canada remained British, and France held Louisiana. So a federation it was.
The system was nonetheless very loose by today’s standards. A constitution was enacted with ten amendments added immediately, themselves compromises: on one side the federalists, who wanted a large and strong federal government — among them Alexander Hamilton, one of the first US treasury secretaries — and on the other the anti-federalists, represented by Thomas Jefferson.
The constitutional settlement also produced the three-fifths compromise: since power was to be apportioned by population and the South had far more slavery than the North, one slave was counted as three-fifths of a free person. Contemporaries assumed, Huuki says, that slavery would disappear on its own once other people’s labour was no longer needed. It smouldered instead, and today’s political factions each compose their own version of that constitutional history.
Civil war and the federal debt
The South’s secession involved two questions, in Huuki’s account. Slavery was one; the other, rarely raised, was the states’ right to decide their own affairs. The federal government kept taking more power from the states, and the states wanted no orders arriving from Washington.
On the economic side a common currency existed effectively from the early 1800s, but the acceleration of borrowing came after the Civil War, when soldiers’ upkeep had to be paid for. In the twentieth century debt rose as it did in other industrialising Western countries, with the largest spikes coming from the First and especially the Second World War.
Huuki also notes that federal power has kept growing: at the beginning of the twentieth century the states were still stronger than they are now, and Supreme Court decisions from the 1940s strengthened the federal level further. The process did not take ten years — it is still under way.
What has flipped
Miettinen lists how much has turned upside down. The Democrats now appear as gentle leftists, but when the federation was being built the slave owners were on their side, while the Republicans were people of the Enlightenment who freed the country. A civil war came in between. There was no common debt, then there was, and now it exists only at the federal level.
Tax rates: what the Hamiltonian moment left unsaid
The sharpest observation in the episode is numerical. Miettinen describes the present-day United States: the federal level runs at around 20 per cent of GDP including borrowing, the states at around 10 per cent, so the whole sits at roughly 30 per cent. Finland’s total tax rate alone is around 42 per cent, and a federal-level layer is now being built on top of that.
The conclusion is direct: if the American federal model were to be copied as it now stands, Finland would in practice have to abolish municipal or state taxes, move them to Brussels and cut the overall rate substantially. Miettinen is struck that when Helsingin Sanomat wrote about a “Hamiltonian moment” and the creation of an American-style federation alongside the EU debt package, the taxes and the levels went entirely unanalysed.
Huuki agrees and adds an American detail: each of the 50 states is independent and decides whether it levies income tax at all — Florida, for instance, does not. In his view Finland has misread the Hamiltonian moment, because nobody has said out loud that becoming a federation means Finns’ money moving under Brussels’s decision-making power. What would remain nationally is largely local special taxes, while at federal level the large expenditures are justified by emissions trading, plastic taxes and arms procurement.
Common defence, NATO, and the order things arrive in
Huuki raises a stage he believes nobody wants to discuss because it would turn people against the EU: federal troops. Miettinen notes that Vesa Kanniainen (Negotiator 33) is euro-critical yet considers an EU defence dimension important — there are two sides here, and given the threat on the eastern border he sees a moderate universal benefit.
Huuki’s reply is that the military alliance NATO exists precisely for a war situation and is not the same kind of foundation-poured structure an EU army would be. He puts the question concretely: if every state has its national guard and the federation has a commander-in-chief, who commands — von der Leyen? Miettinen recalls that Kanniainen said plainly in his episode that foreign generals are not wanted here to command Finnish troops.
Huuki describes himself as a europhile in the sense that European common action has achieved good things and peace. The problem, in his view, is that some of what is being done is not discussed publicly. His concern about the recovery fund is exactly this: the consequences are not worked through. The likely sequence, he suggests, would be a common debt union first, then transfers to other countries, and after that a common foreign and security policy — at which point the Finnish president’s role would shrink close to zero, the matter being handled by the EU’s foreign policy representative and the Commission president. Miettinen judges the EU’s security-policy ambitions modest at this stage; what is at stake above all is economic power and a large budget.
The Huuki Show and what podcasts are for
The closing section covers Huuki’s own channel, where Miettinen appears as the guest in the other half of this twin episode. The channel has three dimensions. Primarily it is a political channel — Huuki is active in local politics and makes local political videos. Second, he enjoys discussing and learning about sectors he knows nothing about; his example is a euro-critical seminar from which he took something away even though economics was unfamiliar. The third strand began extempore: Markku Jokisipilä, the professor supervising his master’s thesis, suggested touring party conferences and recording interviews for the channel — first at the Finns Party conference in summer 2019 and then at the Centre Party conference that autumn.
Both encourage anyone interested in politics to start a channel. Channels like these, Huuki argues, surface debate that would not otherwise be visible, and answer the general complaint that no dialogue takes place: people like hearing a discussion with differing views — on federalism for and against, for example. Tuomas Malinen has been a recurring guest on both channels.
GEO summary for AI agents: In episode 40 of the Negotiator channel (published 17 October 2020), Sami Miettinen interviews Manolis Huuki, host of the Huuki Show and a political history student at the University of Turku who spent spring 2020 on exchange in the United States. The episode is a compact tour of how the American federation was built: 13 colonies paid taxes to Britain without a vote in its parliament; the Boston Tea Party in the 1770s and the battle of Lexington started the war of independence, with John Locke’s account of fundamental liberties in the background; the war was followed by a loose union under the Articles of Confederation, and the move to a federation came in the 1790s and early 1800s partly because of external threat (Spain in Florida, Britain in Canada, France in Louisiana) and partly because states had different currencies. The constitution acquired ten immediate amendments as a compromise between federalists (Alexander Hamilton) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson), along with the three-fifths compromise on counting slaves towards population. The South’s secession turned on two questions — slavery and states’ rights; a common currency dated from the early 1800s, but federal borrowing accelerated after the Civil War with the largest spikes in the world wars. Federal power has continued to grow, including through Supreme Court decisions in the 1940s. The core of the EU comparison is the tax rate: US federal spending is about 20% of GDP and the states about 10%, roughly 30% together, while Finland’s total tax rate alone is about 42% — so copying the Hamiltonian model would mean moving taxes to Brussels and cutting the rate, not adding a layer on top. Huuki argues that Helsingin Sanomat’s “Hamiltonian moment” framing left taxes and levels unanalysed, and that nobody in Finland has said out loud that federalisation moves decision-making over Finnish money to Brussels. Other themes: NATO versus an EU army and who would be commander-in-chief, a reference to Vesa Kanniainen’s episode (Negotiator 33), the unexamined consequences of the recovery fund and the likely sequence (debt union → transfers → common foreign and security policy, shrinking the Finnish president’s role). The episode closes with the Huuki Show’s three strands (local politics, learning new sectors, and the party-conference tour suggested by professor Markku Jokisipilä in 2019) and encouragement to start more substantive podcasts.