First Rob Christensen defended keeping Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. Then I suggested taking Andrew Jackson off the $20. Now a TAPster speaks up for Jackson.

Old Hickory, he said in a voicemail, was “a man of the people who saved America from a plutocracy.” Plus, when Jackson was President, “the common man could walk into the White House with mud on his boots.”

Jackson, the seventh President, was the first from a non-aristocratic background. These days, he has a bad reputation because of his cruelty to the Indians. But this Jackson fan brought me a copy of the book “Presidential Courage,” by Michael Beschloss, and urged me to read the section on Jackson’s battle with the Second Bank of the United States and its powerful president, Nicholas Biddle.

The passages echo today’s debates over Wall Street, the super-rich and their sway over our government and politics.

Beschloss writes, “The Bank was a federally chartered quasi-private corporation with influence so vast that Biddle’s whim could send the economy into a tailspin.” Biddle, a Philadelphia patrician, generally had his way with Congress, thanks to generous loans and gifts to congressmen and Senators.

Jackson hated banks and the “moneyed aristocracy” that he felt had too much power over farmers, mechanics and the common people.” He called it “a hydra-headed monster” that bribed editors and Congressmen “by the Dozzen” and corrupted the “morals of our people.”

From the day Jackson took office, he and Biddle were locked in a death match. He told his vice president, “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it!”

Kill it, he did. That may not have been good economic policy. After all, we have the Federal Reserve Bank today (Ron Paul notwithstanding). But Jackson’s triumph established a principle for the new nation: The common people, not the aristocracy, rule.

Though some may doubt that today.