Thursday, December 10, 2020

Why the Right is Wrong on Property

This blog is long overdue for a new post. Moreover, this post itself is long overdue too.

I published my book back in the spring of 2014. Not long after, I posted a sample chapter on this blog. That chapter was about conservatives' insane Nazi analogies. I chose it because it was timely then, but I always thought the heart of the book was the chapter on economic equality. Many of America's founding fathers thought a rough economic equality was crucial for a republic to function. Therefore, the notion that socialism is un-American is nonsense and it is important for ordinary voters to know this.

I probably should have done this years ago.

So without anymore delay, here is another free chapter from my 99 cent ebook tucked behind the cut.

4: Why the Right is Wrong on Property

             Economic Equality is Immensely American

 

The American Revolution almost collapsed on many occasions.

Over eight uncertain years of hardships, the Continental Army was frequently on the verge of disintegrating. The revolutionaries needed reminding what they were fighting for and, lacking Frank Capra’s Why We Fight to steel them against their privations, Thomas Paine penned several pamphlets collectively entitled The American Crisis. The first was written on a drum skin while retreating with Washington’s army. In them, Paine plainly articulated the logic behind the colonists’ revolution and so sustained the newborn nation.

Conservatives have always hated him.

Why? Two reasons:

First, Thomas Paine was a Deist. A Deist is someone who believes in God but not the Bible. Indeed, Deists reject organized religion as a whole. Although most of the founding fathers were Deists, Paine castigated the Bible with such ringing clarity that few conservatives attempt to call him one of their own. (Glenn Beck and Richard Barton are hilarious outliers.) Of course, Thomas Jefferson and many other founders attacked the Bible as well, but most conservatives forget or ignore that inconvenient fact and treat Thomas Paine as the sole exception.

Second, Thomas Paine invented the modern world’s first Social Security plan in a pamphlet entitled Agrarian Justice. It seems that the seed of “creeping socialism” was in our soil from the very start. In fact, it was actually a native plant that we introduced to Europe, much like the potato or the tomato. As John Adams once groused, “Too many Frenchmen, after the example of too many Americans, pant for equality of persons and property. The impracticality of this, God Almighty has decreed, and the advocates of liberty, who attempt it, will surely suffer for it.”(1) Notice the association between liberty and equality. Apparently, spreading the wealth is what “the advocates of liberty” do.

It turns out that the two reasons are actually interrelated. Today, many conservatives misconstrue the concept of natural law to shoehorn the Bible into the Constitution. And to be fair, it is an easy mistake to make. Eighteenth Century thinkers were indeed trying to distinguish “man’s law” from “God’s law.” But since many of them were Deists, they did not use the Bible as a guide to God’s will. Instead, they looked to Native American societies to see how people lived in a free and natural state. And the nearby First Nations had an altogether different concept of property. Instead of individual ownership, they focused on use rights. They shared fields and steams like Europeans shared city streets. And their society stressed an obligation to help others in times of need. This worldview was the inspiration for Thomas Paine’s pamphlet.

If this all sounds like Karl Marx, there is a reason for that. The American and French revolutionaries influenced later radical thought. They had a critical analysis of where aristocracy came from – filthy rich families. On this continent, the founders saw that dynastic dynamic manifest in the South’s planters and the North’s bankers.

Today, the idea that America’s purpose is to facilitate the acquisition of riches is widely accepted – even by its critics. That assumption is bunk. And what men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine said on the topic paints a vividly different picture.

First, these three patriots believed that the earth belonged to all people in common. Therefore, nobody really owns any portion of land. But they also thought that land redistribution would be logistically difficult. So, to compensate the landless for the loss of their natural inheritance, those founders suggested redistributive taxation instead.

As for owning other things, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine reasoned that everyone has a natural right to enough property to secure their survival and independence. Anything above and beyond that ultimately comes from society because society is what magnifies wealth beyond our puny individual efforts. Without society, we are limited to only those crude tools that we can make with our hands. Society provides us with prior innovations to build on, sturdy infrastructure, and other people’s hands.

In other words, long before President Barack Obama, they declared “You didn’t build that” and explained exactly why.

Finally, these three men felt that concentrations of wealth threatened the common good and that government therefore has the obvious right to break them up in order to prevent creeping aristocracy. As they saw it, free society depends on everyone being vigilantly egalitarian.

I know this must be awfully hard to swallow. After all, we are not encouraged to think of our founders as secular intellectuals dabbling in social engineering. And we are sure not supposed to see the revolutionaries as revolutionaries. But they were.

Of course, I am not arguing that the founders all agreed. There were reactionaries as well as radicals.

For example, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay felt wealth should run the country and they had no problem saying so. In fact, if Thomas Jefferson’s account is accurate, Hamilton had actually advocated corruption as a desirable mechanism toward that end. He was an admirer of the British Parliament in which votes and government posts were then openly bought and sold. It kept the rich in control because only they could afford to buy legislation. Hamilton said, “Purge that constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impractical government: as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government that ever existed.” This prompted Thomas Jefferson to claim, “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”(2) If Hamilton were alive today, he would no doubt join the GOP in opposing campaign finance reform.

Some founders took more nuanced and balanced approaches toward property. Both John Adams and James Madison strongly affirmed property rights, but they agreed with Jefferson that concentrated wealth threatened a free society. There was a spectrum of opinion on the issue and, of course, individual founders moved back and forth along it over time. Thus, you can often find conflicting quotes from the same founder.

Consider this lengthy John Adams passage in which he expounds on the divinely-ordained impracticality of economic equality. Although it is not pithy enough to fit on a bumper sticker, it is a fair encapsulation of current conservative thought on property. In fact, it is an argument that conservatives keep trying to shoehorn into the mouths of other founders, like Benjamin Franklin,(3) but it is pure John Adams:

Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables. Would Mr. Nedham be responsible that, if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.

Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.(4)

So, the question is settled, correct? We can now forget about this, right?

Well, not quite. The quote has its problems.

For one thing, it certainly is not a picture of the middle class American dream. In the land that John Adams describes, only twenty percent of the population owns their homes. The remaining eighty percent either rents or are live-in servants (or slaves). Adams assumes permanent scarcity. Recall his description – “a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables.” Is that the America you want to live in? If that is Adams’ idea of capitalism, then it clearly does not work.

But as we shall see shortly, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine had a more optimistic outlook and they advocated using government to create greater prosperity. And they were ultimately correct. The G.I. Bill and the Federal Housing Authority helped rapidly expand the middle class after World War II, creating the strongest economy we ever enjoyed. History has debunked Adams’ assumptions. If wealth redistribution encouraged laziness, the middle class would not have expanded at all – certainly not so dramatically.

Poor people will often blow a one-time windfall like found money. But when those in need get a steady benefit, they think differently – they budget and start to plan for the future. Their worldview and habits change because their circumstances do. Opportunity does that. That is in part why direct cash assistance without strings attached is the most effective anti-poverty program and a powerful argument for the Universal Basic Income.(5)

John Adams thought wealth redistribution would create a cycle of waste; but what it actually does is break the cycle of hopelessness. Again, if Adams’ assumptions were accurate, postwar America would not have become so powerful and prosperous.

But such programs had many antecedents. The Homestead Act of 1862 is the most famous example, but it was preceded by many other such programs. Government giveaways began on day one – indeed, well before American independence. They just took the form of land grants instead of financing.

And the awkwardness does not stop there. This was also the same John Adams who later said that matrimony and property turn people in to “brutes, Yahoos, or demons.” Adams said a lot of other things that would get him lambasted on Fox News. He blasted “aristocratical” banks and agreed with Thomas Jefferson that Alexander Hamilton was corrupt. And he saw all too clearly the devastation wrought by unregulated markets. In the twilight of their lives, Jefferson and Adams rekindled their friendship and discovered that they agreed on a lot more than they thought – although they still disagreed on much.

Yet, for some reason, men like Hamilton are the only founders ever mentioned when the topic is property. Thus, we usually presume they spoke for the founders as a whole and aroused no controversy among their contemporaries. On the contrary, when some founders spoke of the importance of property rights, they were replying to other founders who sought to spread the wealth.

Glossing over this economic conflict is dishonest. The struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton defined early party politics and that fight was ultimately about class. Few know that many of our founders feared great wealth’s threat to liberty, so those who point it out now are called communists or at least labeled “un-American.” But what is un-American is a one-sided debate. This is the other side.

Of course, Thomas Jefferson’s side of the debate had some skeletons in the closet – Native American skeletons as well as African ones. After all, it was Native land that was being handed out.

But there is no denying that America was always the land of hand-outs. Those hardy pioneers hardly “pulled themselves up by their boot straps.” In fact, that idiom is about doing the impossible – like Dr. Seus’ the Lorax flying by hoisting himself by the seat of his pants. You try it sometime.

Less than a century before General Tecumseh Sherman promised freed slaves forty acres for generations of unpaid labor, Thomas Jefferson promised every new settler in Virginia fifty acres. It was in his first draft of the state’s constitution:

Every person of full age neither owning nor having owned [50] acres of land, shall be entitled to an appropriation of [50] acres or to such as shall make up what he owns or has owned [50] acres in full and absolute dominion.(6)

It expanded on a 1705 Virginia law that gave fifty acres to every freed indentured servant. That law was a bribe to discourage those servants from joining in with any more slave revolts. Previously, indentured whites and enslaved blacks joined forces and rebelled together against their masters.(7)

As with General Sherman, Thomas Jefferson was overruled. But both proposals had sought to promote small farms in opposition to vast estates and thus frustrate another resurgence of aristocracy. And both had precedents in other acts and legislation: Tory property was confiscated during the Revolution.

The topic of property is problematic for almost everybody – for most whites, at any rate. There is not a lot of proud to go around. But this is a central thread in America’s narrative and therefore there is no ignoring it. Arguing over property is essentially the story of America. I do not just mean arguing over who owns what, but also over what is and isn’t property and where the very concept of property comes from. For example, the slavery debate was over the distinction between people and property. But landownership and its origin is another important facet. America was the battleground – both literally and figuratively – of all these philosophical and legal debates about property. We stand on ground zero.

So, let us now look at the founders’ concepts in detail. And let us start, as they did, at the beginning. As Thomas Paine put it, “It is only by tracing things to their origin that we gain rightful ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the boundary that divides right from wrong, and teaches every man to know his own.”(8)

In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, the British political philosopher John Locke wrote, “In the beginning, all the world was America.” For a century thereafter, many thinkers pointed to our apparently uncorrupted continent when trying to discern how capital-N Nature intended people to live. One famous example was Jean Jacques Rousseau’s romantic notion of the “noble savage.” Native societies were actually far more diverse and complex than these thinkers realized, but these idealized impressions shaped how they thought people should govern themselves. As James W. Loewen wrote in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong:

Although leadership was substantially hereditary in some nations, most Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “There is not a Man in the Ministry of the Five Nations, who has gain’d his Office. Otherwise than by Merit,” waxed Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden of New York in 1727. “Their Authority is only the Esteem of the People, and ceases the Moment that Esteem is lost.” Colden applied to the Iroquois terms redolent of “the natural rights of mankind”: “Here we see the natural Origin of all Power and Authority among a free People.”

Indeed, Native American ideas may be partly responsible for our democratic institutions. We have seen how Native ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality found their way to Europe to influence social philosophers such as Thomas More, Locke, Montaigne, Montesquieu, And Rousseau. These European thinkers then influenced Americans such as Franklin, Jefferson and Madison.(9)

Economic equality was among these ideas. As Thomas Paine wrote in Agrarian Justice, “To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.”(10)

In his “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” Benjamin Franklin suggested that Natives appreciated this difference. “Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base.”(11)

While Benjamin Franklin faulted our “artificial wants,” Thomas Paine blamed the haphazard advance of civilization and plain old exploitation. Paine’s Agrarian Justice was directed at France and England where population density prevented going back to nature. But if it was no longer an option, it still remained a yardstick:

The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance …

The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state.

In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.(12)

Along the quality-of-life continuum, Caucasian Americans fell somewhere between Native Americans and Europe’s inhabitants. Recall how Benjamin Franklin contrasted our new nation’s standards of living with Europe’s appalling wealth and poverty:

The truth is, that, though there are in that country few people so miserable as the poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich. It is rather a general happy mediocrity that prevails.(13)

Again, the situation has since reversed and America now has the wider wealth gap. But back then, “misery” and “Europe” were linked in the founders’ vocabularies because the difference was far greater overseas. This was the origin of both the “radical egalitarianism” that Robert Bork scorned and the notion that America is (or at least should be) a middle class society.

Both ideals are inherently entwined in the origin of our national identity. In fact, those two threads re-entwine from time to time. In the later Victorian period of monopolies, robber barons, and sweatshops, the working poor and the middle class joined forces, resulting in the subsequent Progressive Era. This alliance resumed during The New Deal and is long overdue now. Indeed, just like the anti-aristocratic rhetoric that often accompanies it, such perennial alliances date back to our nation’s origin, reoccurring whenever society’s “happy mediocrity” is threatened, near extinction, or requires resurrection.

For example, there was a rapidly growing wealth gap in the American colonies shortly before the revolution. Conditions were not nearly as bad as in Europe, but the colonists saw where things were going and sought to stop it. As Ray Raphael pointed out in A People’s History of the American Revolution, it was pretty visible in Boston. “Since the late 1600s, the richest 5 percent of the population had increased their share of the taxable assets from 30 percent to 49 percent, while the wealth owned by the poorest half of the population had decreased from 9 percent to a mere 5 percent.”(14)

In his endnote Raphael added, “In Philadelphia, the changes were even more dramatic. The share of the richest 5 percent increased from 33 percent to 55 percent between 1693 and 1771, while the share of the poorest half declined from 10.1 percent to 3.3 percent.”(15)

I should mention that Benjamin Franklin bragged about our “happy mediocrity” after the Revolution. Whether or not that was the reality, it was certainly his ideal. But this rapidly widening wealth gap unquestionably radicalized the colonists in the run-up to the Revolution. As Gary B. Nash noted in his book The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution:

By mid-century, poverty in Boston had bred contempt for the rich in a number of political writers and fed the notion that great wealth and grinding poverty were organically connected. “From your Labor and Industry,” proclaimed “Phileleutheros” for the mechanics, “arises all that can be called Riches, and by your Hands it must be defended: Gentry, Clergy, Lawyers, and military Officers, do all support their Grandeur by your Sweat, and at your Hazard.”(16)

Nash’s endnote for that 1751 quote is also worthy of showcasing. He wrote, “The pamphlet was taken almost verbatim from Cato’s Letters, no. 69, first published in book form in London in 1724.”(17) I hunted up the original quote because I thought the folks at the libertarian Cato Institute would like to see this one too. I think they have had sufficient time to recover from the shock of that last one:

From your Labour and Industry arises all that can be called Riches, and by your Hands it must be defended: Kings, Nobility, Gentry, Clergy, Lawyers, and military Officers, do all support their Grandeur by your Sweat and Hazard, and in tyrannical Governments upon the People’s Spoils: They there riot upon the Subsistence of the poor People, whose Poverty is their Riches. In corrupt Administrations, your Superiors of all Kinds make Bargains, and pursue Ends at the public Expense, and grow rich by making the People poor.(18)

Of course, modern day conservatives like Robert Bork have a decidedly different take than Cato and Phileleutheros. In Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork wrote:

It is impossible to see any objective harm done to the less wealthy by another’s greater wealth. It is not, after all, the case that the richer man’s income is extracted from the poorer man. Vacationing at the shore, I see a large yacht at anchor in the harbor. Though I may wish I had one, it is quite clear that I do not lack a yacht because another man has one. The economy is not a zero-sum game. A Rockefeller’s or a Bill Gate’s or a Michael Jackson’s wealth does not diminish my wealth or anyone else’s.”(19)

It is funny how Robert Bork sees liberty and equality locked in a zero-sum game, but then denies anything like it in the economy. Even if the economy is constantly growing (and it is currently shrinking, if we use employment as a yardstick), some exploitation still takes place. Bork’s book was published in 1996. By then, the corporate feeding frenzy of mergers, takeovers, and subsequent layoffs had been going on for over a decade. Jobs were being exported at a staggering rate and those that remained stateside were often stripped of benefits and/or paid reduced wages after unions were forced to make repeated concessions. And then there is automation.

But who needed any excuse for layoffs? As business journalist Doug Henwood noticed, “By 1993, it was clear that the quickest way to add 5 points to your stock price was to lay off 50,000 workers.”(20)

All of this was in pursuit of profits not seen since the aforementioned Victorian Era that conservatives are now enthusiastically duplicating. But the revolutionaries fought hard to avoid that world and that can be seen in one document after another. As Gary Nash added to that above Phileleutheros quote:

Now such notions entered the consciousness of the laboring classes in other port towns. “Some individuals,” charged a New Yorker in 1765, “… by Smiles of Providence, or some other Means, are enabled to roll in their four wheel’d [sic] Carriages and can support the expense of good Houses, rich Furniture, and Luxurious Living. But is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?”(21)

Apparently, the “Ninety Nine Percent” that the Occupy Wall Street Movement spoke of had a Revolutionary Era precedent. When Colin Powell called the Occupy movement “as American as apple pie,” he was probably only referring to their right to protest and air their grievances. But their critique of economic inequality is far more American than most people suspect. Thus, it is not the Tea Party, but Occupy Wall Street that had truly inherited the mantle of the Boston Tea Party.

Incidentally, a 2011 study had asked Americans to guess our nation’s current wealth distribution. The respondents believed that the wealthiest fifth only held 59% of the nation’s wealth. The actual amount is 84%.(22) Despite their lowball estimate, most still said redistribution was necessary. Indeed, when shown pie charts, 92% of respondents preferred Sweden’s more equitable wealth distribution to America’s.

As the colonists looked at nearby Native Americans, they began to esteem their own “laborious manner of life” as “slavish and base.” This may explain why they adopted Indian imagery when inventing a new national identity – thus, the street theater of the original Boston Tea Party.

Oddly, today’s Tea Party movement does not dress as Natives at their protests. If cultural sensitivity prompted some proactive memo from FreedomWorks or the Koch Brothers, it apparently said nothing about portraying President Obama as a monkey or a witch doctor.

But our founding fathers did not stop at studying the First Nations or at drawing symbolic associations with them. They also adopted Native concepts and an important one was that the earth belonged to all people in common. They thus reasoned that land ownership was not a natural right but rather a social construct. Thomas Paine was only one among many European thinkers who seized this idea, but he expressed it best and put it in humorous terms that most Europeans could easily understand by citing the Bible:

It is deductible, as well from the nature of the thing as from all the stories transmitted to us, that the idea of landed property commenced with cultivation, and that there was no such thing, as landed property before that time. It could not exist in the first state of man, that of hunters. It did not exist in the second state, that of shepherds: neither Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, nor Job, so far as the history of the Bible may credited in probable things, were owners of land. Their property consisted, as is always enumerated, in flocks and herds, they traveled with them from place to place. The frequent contentions at that time about the use of a well in the dry country of Arabia, where those people lived, also show that there was no landed property. It was not admitted that land could be claimed as property. There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.(23) (italics original)

As if anticipating J.D. Rockefeller’s boast “God gave me my money,” Thomas Paine wrote, “It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female, and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.”(24) (italics original) The founders made this point repeatedly. In a 1785 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.”(25) In short, they thought the land was as free as the air and that nobody really owned either.

Most Enlightenment thinkers agreed that paradise was lost with the advent of private land ownership. Even the so-called “Father of Capitalism” Adam Smith admitted, “But this original state of things, in which the laborer enjoyed the whole produce of his own labor, could not last beyond the first introduction of the appropriation of land and the accumulation of (live)stock.” He added, “As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the laborer can either raise or collect from it.”(26)

That guy sounds like a commie to me.

This explains the immense impact of the Native American example. But, the concept of private landownership was then relatively recent – even in the European world. In medieval times, the nation’s land technically belonged to the king. But, there were these facts on the ground called “castles,” and they often made enforcement problematic for the monarch.(27) In theory, the king could always strip a lord of his land and rank and give it to another. But in reality, feudal lords were often collectively – if not individually – more powerful than the king. In England, this reality was formalized into law by the Magna Carta, which permanently limited the monarch’s power.

Needless to say, this situation gave local lords a strong sense of entitlement. But the concept of outright ownership had not yet fully taken hold. Hereditary control of territory was deeply rooted in tradition and had almost all the perks of outright ownership. Thus, there was not yet any need to rethink land and property. True, lords still owed traditional obligations to those both above and below them. The peasants who worked the land had various traditional land rights such as water access, the right to graze livestock, and the right to gather firewood off the ground (i.e. “windfall”) on certain days of the week. In turn, the lord got a portion of the crops in exchange for his “protection.”

So long as this situation suited the lords, it was unlikely to change. But change it did. In England, this metamorphosis occurred during the Enclosure Movement. Local lords discovered that it was often more profitable to graze sheep for their wool. The lords thus declared the land to be their private property and pushed their peasants off. Now homeless, these poor people drifted into the larger towns and cities looking for work. This surplus population, in turn, fueled England’s desire for overseas colonies.

For the founders, this was relatively recent history. Indeed, the process of enclosure was not complete until well after American independence. This and the Native example impacted the founders’ thoughts. Every single aspect of their situation logically compelled them to critically think about where property originally came from. They had a recent model of what went wrong as well an opportunity to rewrite the rules. And they justified the rewrite by saying that land ownership was the invention of social law rather than natural law. Thus, society could rewrite the rules at any time.

It was the obvious conclusion for them to make. After all, those who accept the status quo as God’s will are not apt to rebel in the first place. But, once you jettison the Divine Right of Kings, you must rethink property entirely. A secular mindset invites scrutiny of human institutions to see how they might be improved or replaced. If we made them, then we can change them.

This distinction between natural law and social law is essential. To get a clearer idea of what these men meant, it is necessary to contrast land ownership with ownership of moveable objects. Both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine described how concepts of property developed alongside different stages of society. In a piece entitled “The Batture at New Orleans,” Jefferson contrasts land ownership with personal effects, alluding to some of the history I have just outlined:

That the lands within the limits assumed by a nation belong to the nation as a body, has probably been the law of every people on earth at some period of their history. A right of property in movable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands not till after that establishment. The right to movables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and the owner protected in his possession. Till then the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as their trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the condition of the grant.(28)

The quote comes from a discussion of property and feudalism. Jefferson was referring to early kings and chieftains to argue that land is public before it becomes private. A people or tribe might control a territory collectively, but individual ownership cannot exist before formal government does. After all, you need deeds and other enforcement mechanisms. Peeing around the perimeter only works until a bigger dog comes along – or until it next rains. But until government is invented, that is the best you can do.

And, as Thomas Jefferson said, this was universal. Land stolen from the Indians was the property of the federal government before being sold or simply given away to white settlers. But land is always originally public until bequeathed by government. Before then, “movables” are the only individual property that exists.

Thomas Jefferson was not afraid to carry this concept to its logical conclusions. In an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson, he reiterates that natural law does not protect land ownership, but then he weakens “the right to movables.” Even more radically, he then denies that natural law covers intellectual property. This seems counterintuitive. After all, if we inherently own anything, it is our own ideas, right? Thomas Jefferson thought not:

It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of a natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an [sic] universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others to exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and the improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.(29)

Now, before writing him off as a kook, it is important to recognize what Jefferson is and is not saying. He is not against recognizing intellectual property. He was a prolific inventor himself and felt society should encourage innovation in every way. Accordingly, it was Jefferson who first introduced the bill that created the U.S. Patent Office. But he did not believe intellectual property was a natural right. Like landownership, he thought intellectual property was the gift of society and that society had the right to decide how that property could best serve the common good.(30) The logical compromise gives us the best of both worlds – society rewards the inventor with temporary ownership, but the idea eventually passes into the public domain and then belongs to everybody. Obviously, nobody holds the patent on the wheel or the chair. This also keeps the inventor’s descendants from sponging off his or her ideas indefinitely.

And Jefferson was not alone. Benjamin Franklin was a famous inventor himself and he shared Thomas Jefferson’s public-spirited attitude towards intellectual property. In fact, in his classic Autobiography, the Pennsylvanian explains why he refused to put a patent on his famous Franklin Stove:

This pamphlet had a good effect, Gov. Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove, as described in it that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz. That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”(emphasis original)(31)

If your goal is to better the world, un-patented inventions unquestionably spread faster because everybody likes free stuff. Franklin chose to share his invention for free. But even back then, it was still understood that intellectual ownership was only temporary. The Governor had offered Franklin an exclusive right “for a term of years” – not forever.

Many think this attitude is ultimately unproductive. Many others disagree. In such books as Copyrights and Copywrongs, Steal This Idea, and The Future of Ideas, the respective authors argue that the technology boom is fueled by the fact that nobody owns the Internet and thus everyone does. The Internet is what they call an “innovation commons” – an unregulated public space that nobody owns or controls. It has become a popular marketplace of ideas precisely because most things are free. Those who share Benjamin Franklin’s technological generosity can post their shareware where anyone can download it. Tips, shortcuts, and all sorts of improvements are rapidly disseminated, discussed, critiqued, applied and fine-tuned. The motto of this “open source” software movement is “information wants to be free.” (Recall Thomas Jefferson’s candle analogy.) In this intellectually selfless environment, technological breakthroughs leapfrog forward to benefit all, so obviously generosity is not such a quixotic vehicle for progress. Thus, the notion that no innovation takes place without the profit motive is patently false.

But once again, the founders were not against protecting intellectual property. On the contrary, they even put it in the Constitution in order to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” They were just saying that it is a matter of social law rather than natural law. Accordingly, society can alter it at any time, in society’s best interests. We, as a society, can always debate which policies are wisest, but it is our collective decision to make.

Likewise, land ultimately belongs to everyone in common. Individual ownership of land is a legal fiction which we entertain because many people believe it is useful and benefits society most of the time. But, when it ceases to benefit the public good or conflicts with some greater public good the fiction is no longer indulged. Hence eminent domain, which says that the government may take land for the public good, provided the owner is compensated at market value. This is typically done to build bridges and highways. But the underlying idea is that the legal fiction is entertained only as long as it benefits society.

Accordingly, the founders felt they were perfectly justified in seizing Tory property both during and after the revolution. The post-Civil War proposal to break up plantations among the slaves who had worked them was likewise consistent with this thinking. The concept of landownership has never been sacrosanct in America – neither to Natives nor Anglo invaders.

After the American Revolution, many veterans sought to take things beyond confiscating enemy property. In New Hampshire, the militia had to be called out on September 20th of 1786 to disperse an angry mob of veterans who had besieged the state legislature in Exeter for three days. Among their demands were the issuance of paper money, the forgiveness of debts, tax relief, and the equal distribution of property.(32) Basically, everything John Adams had feared in that long quote toward the front of the chapter.

Why? Because the vets had come home to find their farms about to be foreclosed on by bankers who had never shouldered a musket. Naturally, they felt betrayed and linked their revolt to the revolution they had just fought. They compared bankers to Tories. Therefore, it seemed consistent to confiscate their property as well.

Conservatives will predictably attribute this incident to irrational rabble. But officers were involved in the Exeter event, which suggests a much broader swath of support. As the Columbia Magazine reported two weeks later:

Oct 9. Colonel Stone, Major Cochran, Capt. Cochran, Lieut. Robinson, Capt. McKean, Lieut. McClary, Capt. Dow, Lieutenant Clough, and Ensign Cotton, officers of the New Hampshire militia, are to be tried by court martial on the 21st of next month, for aiding, abetting and assisting the insurgents lately assembled at Exeter.(33)

Obviously, this incident alarmed many. In Federalist # 10, James Madison obliquely acknowledged this often forgotten conflict the following year. He wrote that friction between the haves and have-nots is “the most common and durable source of factions” in society, and recognized that the have-nots have a program to be thwarted. Accordingly, he advised the voters of (then conservative) New York that:

[A] rage for paper money, for the abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

I imagine the state that James Madison had in mind was New Hampshire – which is quite interesting, given the Granite State’s present libertarian bent.

This is not to say that James Madison was entirely in Alexander Hamilton’s camp. After all, Thomas Jefferson was his political mentor. Madison was a midpoint between Hamilton and Jefferson and obsessed with maintaining balance. He was more concerned with preventing conflicts than protecting the interests of the rich, and he clearly saw the necessity of preserving Benjamin Franklin’s “happy mediocrity” in order to avoid such tumults. When discussing the emergence of political parties, he gave five guidelines for mitigating their tendency to generate unrest. Two of them advocate regulating wealth:

In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them. The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort. 4. By abstaining from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expence [sic] of another. 5. By making one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented, nor their views accommodated.(34)

No, it was not just Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine who advocated economic equality. Many other revolutionary luminaries concurred, either quietly or out loud at some point. John Adams and his cousin Samuel Adams (now of beer fame) privately agreed with the above trio on the topic of property. As Gary B. Nash described in The Urban Crucible:

John Adams was one of those who had read his republican theory carefully enough to understand the connection between economic inequality and political corruption. In preparing his Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law, one of the most powerful republican statements of the 1760s, Adams wrote that “Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.” But Adams, caught between Whig and Evangelical modes of thinking, thought better of the statement, engaged as he was with wealthy Whig merchants in the early stages of resistance, and deleted it from his text.(35)

Yes, that era’s Evangelicals favored spreading the wealth. Something about everyone being equal in God’s eyes influenced them. I will cover this more in my next book.

John’s cousin Sam was in a similar predicament. As Nash added on the next page:

Samuel Adams, who had no commercial aspirations, might inveigh that “Luxury & Extravagance are in my opinion totally destructive of those Virtues which are necessary for the Preservation of the Liberty and Happiness of the People.” Yet Adams, though devoid of capitalist urges, was trying to lead a radical movement from New England’s largest commercial center and had to work with John Hancock, who lived high on the hill and stocked his cellar with the best Madeira wines. Hancock’s purse and prestige were vital to the success of the Massachusetts patriot movement and he was not risking his life and fortune for a return to Arcadian simplicity.(36)

There is that societal happiness business again – and, again, in opposition to property. Funny thing that.

But while the Adams cousins had kept their republican ideology under their hats, other founders did not. The notion that government must actively equalize fortunes and discourage concentrations of wealth was widespread and, as Gary B. Nash had noted above, a fixture in republican political theory.

Indeed, speaking of Evangelicals like John Adams, take Noah Webster (of dictionary fame). In 1787, this devout man wrote that a rough material equality was absolutely essential to preserving our free form of government:

An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic – While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form. The liberty of the press, trial by jury, the Habeas Corpus writ, even the Magna Charta itself, although justly deemed the palladia of freedom, are all inferior considerations, when compared with a general distribution of real property among every class of people. (emphasis original)(37)

Of course, modern conservatives do not share our founders’ concerns. The late Robert Bork doubted that, “the workings of democracy are impeded if there is too great a disparity in the wealth of the citizens.” “There are many avenues to political power and wealth is not the most significant.”(38) For example, Bork himself had slept his way onto the national stage.

Okay, that was probably an improper joke. But, levity aside, who was our last non-millionaire president? How many senators and congressmen are not millionaires? How does Mr. Smith get to Washington today without being rich and/or catering to them?

Robert Bork did not seem to understand how our political system works. He was mired in denial about a great many things and the role of money is politics is one of them. That or he was straight-up lying. But beyond his grasp of our current political system’s structural mechanics, he was utterly tone deaf to our original national ethos:

Envy certainly has shaped and continues to shape our political culture. That is probably why it is front-page news in the New York Times that the United States displays greater inequality in wealth than other industrial nations. The unstated assumption that makes this worthy of the front page is that there is something morally wrong, even shameful, in having greater wealth inequalities than other societies.(39)

Of course, Robert Bork knew he was profoundly out of step with America’s central ideological thrust. He even admitted that his assault on equality “verges on heresy.”(40)

Verge is not the word. For Bork, egalitarianism was an ugly, irrational impulse. While the founders I just quoted above saw it as a bulwark of social harmony and our free form of government, Bork saw it as culturally-indulged envy. But of course, this is also the same Robert Bork who claimed that the founders forgot to bother with morality or social order because things were so tranquil that they could be safely taken for granted.

This brings us back to those rebellious New Hampshire veterans who besieged the state house demanding an equal distribution of property. While their aims were consistent with the concept that land ownership is the gift of social law, I am not mentioning this to make an argument for communism. On the contrary, both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine favored widespread land ownership as socially beneficial and thought it should be encouraged – provided that small family plots did not grow into vast aristocratic estates. For Jefferson, the small farmer was the bedrock of American society. Accordingly, both wrote that outright land redistribution would be logistically impractical and advocated progressive taxation instead.

Jefferson acknowledged, “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property.”

“Cannot invent too many.” Rally your imaginations.

To this end, Jefferson suggested a two-pronged strategy of: 1) Ending primogeniture, the traditional aristocratic practice of willing all property to the eldest son, and 2) Taxing “the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”(41)

Thomas Paine did not call for the equal division of land because he thought farmers owned their labor like everyone else. He distinguished between land and the cultivation of land. Since the two things are impossible to separate, Paine suggested taxation as a means of re-achieving original equality. To fund his Social Security program, Paine proposed a land tax that he called a “ground rent” to emphasize the premise that the land actually belongs to society as a whole:

And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.

Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.(42)

For Thomas Paine, taxation, social responsibility, and the origin of property were all fundamentally interrelated and he emphasized this idea repeatedly in Agrarian Justice:

Land, as before said, is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.(43)

I know what you are thinking. “I’m not rich? Dude! I OWN A WHOLE GODDAMNED ISLAND!”

But you still need other people to be rich. Without them, you do not meaningfully own anything. You are just another creature on the landscape. You do not own the island any more than that tiger over there. And that tiger is now going to eat you because safety in numbers does not work as well when you are all alone.

“No problem,” you may say, “I will just shoot it with my gun.”

But what gun? Who made the gun? This raises the question of stuff. Somebody made all of your tools and chances are that somebody was not you. The castaway Robinson Crusoe did not own a sweet set of wheels or enjoy indoor plumbing. Other people need to make that stuff. In fact, other people need to invent that stuff. Thus, the creation of wealth depends on the infrastructure of society – the legacy of other people’s previous physical and mental efforts.

Society creates conveniences just as government confers ownership. Without either, property is nothing more than a small collection of primitive personal effects – i.e. “movables.” There is no avoiding the ultimate logical conclusion of this fact: Ironically, individual ownership requires the collective consent and cooperation of other people. You only own what society says you do. Property is a social construct.

As you might imagine, Benjamin Franklin heartily agreed with Thomas Paine that society magnified our efforts and was due something back to perpetuate the process. Indeed, in a 1783 letter to fellow founding father Robert Morris, Franklin wrote:

All the property that is necessary to a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of: but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.(44)

Benjamin Franklin echoed his conclusion on other occasions:

Private property therefore is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society, whenever its necessities shall require it, even to the last farthing: its contributions therefore to the public exigencies are not to be considered as conferring a benefit on the public, entitling the contributors to the distinctions of honor and power, but as a return of an obligation previously received, or the payment of a just debt.(45)

If the strength of Benjamin Franklin’s emphasis escapes you, a farthing was an old English coin worth one fourth of a penny. Franklin was emphatic about the duty of giving something back.

Conservatives went totally bonkers when both Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren articulated the same basic principle (albeit in a far softer tone) during the 2012 election. Both campaigners had reminded business that their success was built on the infrastructure and education that society had already provided. Elizabeth Warren was fired up:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

President Barack Obama then reasoned, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.” Then he turned to public infrastructure – including the electronic infrastructure of the Internet:

Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Note that neither Warren nor Obama denied the importance of individual effort. Instead, they put it in context. Just as you need both hydrogen and oxygen to make water, prosperity comes from the combination of individual and the collective efforts. That is just common sense.

Of course, conservatives ignored that context and seized on the words “You didn’t build that.” They called it communism and the Republican Party promptly made “We Built It” the theme of their 2012 National Convention. Amusingly, they held it in a convention center which was mostly built with taxpayer funds.(46) And to spearhead their message, they selected a speaker who had built her government contracting business with the help of government loans.(47) Oblivious to their hypocrisy, they went ballistic. Imagine if Warren or Obama had said society was entitled to the “last farthing” as Franklin had!

Conservatives often stoke the erroneous notion that the American Revolution was fought over taxes. On the contrary, it was all about reciprocity. The revolutionaries did not say “no taxation,” but rather “no taxation without representation.” They saw it as a two-way street. They believed that the legitimacy of taxation hinged on government being an agent of the people’s will. It has the right to levy taxes to do the people’s work because the people had approved that work to be done through their representatives. But without representation, the legitimacy of taxation evaporates. That was the point.

No, the founders were not as anti-tax as conservatives imagine. As Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, “The continual whine of lamenting the burden of taxes, however successfully it may be practised [sic] in mixed Governments, is inconsistent with the sense and spirit of a republic.”(48) The word “mixed” refers to the fact that the British Parliament was half elected (the House of Commons) and half not (the House of Lords). Of course, the American colonists had no representation in either house of Parliament. That was their point.

Benjamin Franklin frequently addressed this continual whine after American independence was won because taxation no longer lacked representation. Democracy legitimizes taxation (which is another reason why conservatives and libertarians say they oppose democracy). As the new nation was no longer an exploited colony, it should logically pull together for the common good. And Franklin was all about pulling together.

Of course, this is the same Ben Franklin who wrote, “An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind.”(49) As I mentioned in chapter one, those jolting words come from his first draft of Pennsylvania’s Declaration of Rights. He started writing it four days before he signed the Declaration of Independence. And it was he who inserted “the pursuit of happiness” in place of John Locke’s original “pursuit of property.”

Conservatives and libertarians alike will likely blast Benjamin Franklin as an enemy of entrepreneurs or some kind of crank bent on “punishing success.” But he was in fact one of the few truly self-made men at Pennsylvania’s convention. He went from being a poor printer’s apprentice to being a wealthy international celebrity. Franklin embodied the American ideal of social mobility. But conservatives see remembering your humble origins as a sort of hypocrisy. They think that once you become rich, you must adopt their collective agenda. Therefore, they think Michael Moore is a hypocrite because he has not become a Republican. To conservatives, selling out is a badge of character and maturity. But Franklin did not forget where he had come from. In fact, years after he had become a success, he annoyed his fellow Philadelphia printers by supporting their workers when they went on strike.(50) He always stuck up for the underdog and aided the rank and file whenever he could. And, as a selection from the Pennsylvania Gazette attests, this included the rank and file on the battlefield – who shared his suspicion of the rich:

The Committee of Correspondence of the Committee of Privates in Philadelphia, wrote a circular letter to all the battalions in the State previous to the election of the members for the late Convention. In this letter the good people of this State were advised to choose no rich men, and as few learned men as possible to represent them in the Convention. They are charged to avoid choosing all such men as are under proprietary influence, “without their knowing it,” and lastly they are directed to instruct their representatives when chosen to insist upon the people choosing their militia officers, and upon our having only one Legislature.

A member of the late Convention congratulated the State upon the opening of the Convention, that a set of plain men with good understandings were assembled together to make a government. It was debated for some time in the Convention, whether the future legislatures of this State should have the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals.(51)

Now, the Pennsylvania Gazette was Benjamin Franklin’s own newspaper. And, of course, the member of the convention in question was Franklin himself. (No doubt he was also the reporter on the story.) Apparently, his attempt to butter up his colleagues failed since they rejected his proposal, but it still reflected a widespread sentiment. Suspicion of the rich was a frequent feature of revolutionary rhetoric.

One reason why Franklin felt society should limit wealth was that the wealthy were constantly trying to institutionalize their influence. Two years later, Pennsylvania’s rich attempted to rig the new state constitution in their favor. They suggested an amendment to create a bicameral legislature in which the upper house would explicitly represent property and the lower house would represent population. Franklin wrote a point-by-point critique of this proposal. Here is his summation, which I have quoted from before:

The combinations of civil society are not like those of a set of merchants, who club their property in different proportions for building and freighting a ship, and may therefore have some right to vote in the disposition of the voyage in a greater or less degree according to their respective contributions: but the important ends of civil society, and the personal securities of Life and Liberty, these remain the same in every member of the society; and the poorest continues to have equal claim to them with the most opulent, whatever difference time, chance, or industry may occasion in their circumstances. On these considerations, I am sorry to see the signs this paper I have been considering affords, of a disposition among some of our people to commence an aristocracy, by giving the rich a predominancy [sic] in government.(52)

Benjamin Franklin won this later fight and today Pennsylvania still has only one legislative body.

Franklin’s fear was real and widespread. It was not just some rhetorical cudgel. Old ways run deep and there was the threat of societal backsliding. As I mentioned, Southern planters had already cultivated aristocratic airs and New England’s elite still admired old England’s hierarchy. In fact, after the revolution, some disgruntled officers even wanted to see George Washington crowned king. This is why the Constitution explicitly forbids granting titles of nobility. Great concentrations of wealth were a related concern.

All of this ties into modern discussions about the size of government. Conservatives believe that the founding fathers all wanted small government and free markets. It is an article of faith for them. But their assumption is bunk for three interrelated reasons:

First, as I have just shown in great detail, the founders strongly disagreed on free markets and had very different concepts of property rights. Thomas Jefferson wanted to regulate business and spread the wealth whereas Alexander Hamilton thought the rich should rule.

Second, the founders also strongly disagreed about the size of government. Thomas Jefferson clashed with Alexander Hamilton over this as well. And George Washington tended to agree with Hamilton, as can be seen in a 1787 letter: “The Men who oppose a strong and energetic government are, in my opinion, narrow minded politicians, or are under the influence of local views.”(53)

Ooo! Stinging dis! Flintlocks fired!

I want to be charitable, but who does not know that the Federalists and Anti-Federalists bitterly fought over this issue with Federalists wanting “strong and energetic government”? Political campaigns were incredibly ugly, with both sides slandering each other. To suggest that there was consensus where there was scalding conflict is either ignorant or dishonest – hilariously so in any case.

Third, conservatives cannot find a single founder who endorsed both parts of their program. Again, a quick glance at Jefferson and Hamilton explains why. Big government founders like Hamilton favored free trade. Small government founders like Jefferson, sought to regulate commerce. Those might sound like odd combos to modern readers, but those were the two political sides in those times.

This was not contradictory because Thomas Jefferson’s concept of “big government” meant large armies and broad police powers – something modern conservatives support. Jefferson’s claim that banks were “more dangerous than standing armies” encapsulates not only his worldview but the political battle lines of his day. But today, advocating “small government” means letting big business run amuck. Thus, conservatives’ small government/free market story twists history considerably.

Of course, you could argue that this is inconvenient to liberals too, but not really. This is because liberals do not see the founders as prophets handing down unchanging, eternal laws from God. While conservatives often fetishize “original intent” and blast relativism, liberals are far more comfortable with accepting change and putting things into context.

So, what had changed? What accounts for this switch in pairing? The socio-economic landscape is what changed.

Initially, the rich wanted a strong central government to overturn states’ debt amnesty laws. As I wrote before, bankers were foreclosing on former soldiers’ farms, so the vets voted out judges and state legislators they thought were beholden to banks. Then, the officials whom they voted-in got busy forgiving veterans’ debts. Today’s conservative anti-democratic arguments date back to this period. As John Adams feared, “Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and voted.”

Needless to say, this alarmed Alexander Hamilton’s friends. So, they turned to the Feds to preserve their interpretation of property rights. After all, that is what they felt the Constitution was for. As James Madison had argued in Federalist #10, “a rage for paper money, for the abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project” would be less likely to prevail on the national stage. And federal authority could then intervene to squelch it locally. So conservatives then preferred a strong central government.

But much later, corporations became behemoths. The rich subsequently discovered that localities were easier to bully and bribe than Uncle Sam. State senators are much cheaper to buy than U.S. senators, and you can pit states against each other in a race to the bottom in average wages, tax rates, and safety standards, etc. So accordingly, companies now favor “devolving” power back to the states. Makes sense now, right?

Likewise, Republicans used to be the pro-tariff party when wealthy industrialists feared foreign competition. Today, those same industrial interests are moving factories overseas and therefore favor free trade. The economic landscape has changed, but conservative support for the rich remains a constant – that has not altered one jot.

About a century after independence in the Victorian Age, families like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers realized our founders’ fears by building financial dynasties. Critics called them “robber barons” for monopolizing markets, maintaining private armies, and murdering strikers.

But today corporate apologists like Arthur C. Brooks and John Stossel are not simply sympathetic, but celebratory. Lester C. Thurow’s love of aristocracy was pretty obvious in his 2000 book, Building Wealth: The New Rules for Individuals, Companies, and Nations in a Knowledge-based Economy. First, he rhapsodizes over robber barons:

Great wealth allows individuals to place their footprints in the sands of time. Everyone knows the billionaires of the last half of the nineteenth century – Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Mellon. Few remember the U.S. presidents of that era. Those with great wealth are the stuff of history books. They are the modern immortals.(54)

Then, the author’s monarchist leanings reach full froth. “Those with great wealth are important, to be courted. They are deserving of respect and demand deference.” Thus, you should kiss his lordship’s ring.

And these corporate troubadours are not apologetic about their desire to subvert our form of government. Thurow openly boasted, “Political influence can be quietly bought. Campaign contributions effectively give the wealthy more than one vote.”

Other authors put on a more democratic gloss. In the future, they say, the market will register the people’s will better than any election and do so on a moment-by-moment basis. Thomas Friedman heralded a coming “one dollar, one vote” system, prompting Thomas Frank to point out that Friedman had actually given “the definition of plutocracy, not democracy.”(55) But, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, society is not a group of investors so you cannot justify giving the rich more votes.

I have heard Thomas Paine called an “outlier” for his economic concepts. And yet, I quote a lot of other founding outliers. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were the other two heavy hitters. Other giants, like James Madison and the two Adams cousins also agreed – albeit privately or less frequently. Lesser known luminaries of the revolution, such as Noah Webster, also confirmed that this was a fundamental fixture of republican ideology. So, Paine was no outlier.

The religious right plays the same game with deism. They cast poor Thomas Paine in Hell and pronounce all the other founders devout, Bible-believing Christians. But Paine embodied the Enlightenment on both topics. This was where revolutionary thinking was headed until greed and religion resurged in the early 1800s.

These founding outliers often get dismissed because their ideas were not applied in their lifetimes. After all, Thomas Paine’s social security proposal was postponed so long that almost nobody knows about it. Well, many founders saw slavery as a contradiction to be eliminated, but abolition got postponed too. Their failure to end slavery in their lifetimes does not make their ideas irrelevant. And if their anti-slavery writings are significant, then their economic writings should be too. They certainly should be admissible when conservatives call today’s social programs un-American.

Both issues pitted revolutionary ideals against deeply entrenched economic interests, so I suppose some disappointment is to be expected. But these radical ideas on property were part and parcel of their concept of natural law. The fact that those who had no analysis beyond crying “Mine!” initially prevailed does not change this. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of a natural right, a separate property in an acre of land.” The serious thinkers agreed, but lost to greed. Thus, the revolution got sold out.

Now I am not saying that the First Continental Congress was the First International or anything like that. The founders fought over this issue – Hamilton and Jefferson clashed. And those I quote to make my case stopped just short of land redistribution.

But they did explicitly endorse wealth redistribution by taxation. They said property was not God-given but a social construct and that society was thus entitled to part of the wealth it had created. And they repeatedly emphasized that a rough economic equality was essential to preserving a free republic. Thus, the New Deal and the Great Society were completely in keeping with the revolution’s ideals. Indeed, despite being denied and delayed, their ultimate thrust was built-in to our nation’s ideological foundations. They are undeniably in our national DNA. Again, we introduced these Native American ideas to Europe.

Does the fact that the founders fought amongst themselves mean that they cancel each other out? Should we thus ignore what they said as irrelevant today?

Of course not. Just as Galileo and the Church fought over whether the earth orbited the sun, our founders also fought over slavery and the property qualification for voting. But we now know who turned out to be right, initial defeats notwithstanding. I argue that these progressive founders were likewise right about property all along.

Today, the immodest and unmerited riches that James Madison spoke of are flaunted. We now have the widest wealth gap since the Great Depression and the bankers who had crashed the economy awarded themselves enormous bonuses with the bailout money. Of course, CEOs have already been rewarding themselves for poor performance for years, so I suppose that last fact should not have shocked us much.

Likewise, America’s wealth gap began widening with Reaganomics. Just as its critics predicted, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. So, the writing was dry on that wall as well. Our predicament was decades in the making, and it did not creep up on us unseen.

My point is that those warnings date back to our country’s origins and before. Cato’s Letters, penned in the early 1720s, clarify current events – but not quite like libertarians imagine. The Enlightenment did not ignore the problem of poverty or the issue of class. Serious thinkers addressed these issues and ordinary people took to the streets or picked up muskets to deal with them before, during, and after the revolution.

Granted, you do not need a pamphlet from 1765 to ask if ninety nine “should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one?” But it helps.


 



1) John Adams, Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850-56) 9:564.

2) Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 1:270. Summing up, Jefferson qualified, “Hamilton was, indeed, a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest, and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched and perverted by the British example, as to be under the thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.”

3) Strangely, Benjamin Franklin seems to be their favorite patient for this postmortem oral surgery. “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” That quote (and its very many variants) are alternately attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, and a Scottish jurist and historian of that time named Alexander Fraser Tytler, a.k.a. Lord Woodhouselee. But it cannot be found among their works and its earliest appearance in print is a 1951 newspaper. Since then, it has been used by personalities as different as Ronald Reagan and Penn Jillette.

4) John Adams, Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850-56) 6:8-9.

5) Charles Kenny, “Give Poor People Cash: There’s a simple way to reform welfare: Send money to those who need it, without conditions” Atlantic Monthly, 25 September 2015,  https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/welfare-reform-direct-cash-poor/407236/ (accessed January 26, 2013).

6) Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (New York: Library of America, 1984), 343.

7) Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 36-37.

8) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 612.

9) James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 110-112.

10) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 610.

11) Benjamin Franklin, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth (New York: MacMillan, 1905-1907), 20:97.

12) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 610. Of course, some will say that things are now better than ever for everyone. Yet somehow I doubt that the six year old boy scrounging for edible scraps in the garbage dunes around Rio de Janeiro is really better off than the one in a rainforest village.

13) Benjamin Franklin, Works of Benjamin Franklin; Containing Several Political and Historical Tracts Not Included in Any Former Edition., and Many Letters Official and Private, not Hitherto Published; with Notes and a Life of the Author, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: Tappan & Whittemore, 1836), 2:468.

14) Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: Perennial, 2002), 16.

15) Ibid., 405.

16) Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 263.

17) Ibid., 263.

18) John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, (New York: DaCapo Press, 1971), 2:8. This is an exact facsimile of the original edition except that it was republished in two volumes instead of the original four. But, the original title pages for each volume have been retained.

19) Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1997), 68.

20) Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 191.

21) Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 263.

22) Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a better America – one wealth quintile at a time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2011): 10.

23) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 611.

24) Ibid., 609.

25) Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 19:18.

26) Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1901), 1:121.

27) As both a fact and a symbol, castles represented decentralization. When France began centralizing, part of the process was tearing down castles and the walls around fortified towns. By contrast, Germany did not unify until 1871 and still has lots of castles left. There, local control remained dominant until Prussia absorbed all the smaller German states and baronies.

28) Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 18:45.

29) Ibid., 13:333.

30) For those interested in learning more about Jefferson on this topic, I recommend Jeffrey H. Matsuura’s Jefferson vs the Patent Trolls: A Populist Vision of Intellectual Property Rights.

31) Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (New York: Library of America, 1990), 113.

32) Boston Magazine, September/October 1786, 401. Available on reel 9 of the American Periodical Series. The exact same “Account of the Insurrection in the State of New Hampshire – Written by a Gentleman who happened to be present” can also be found reprinted in The New Haven Gazette & Connecticut Magazine for Thursday October 5th, 1786 on reel 20.

33) Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany, October 1786, 96. Available on reel 9 of the American Periodical Series.

34)  James Madison, Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland, et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 14:197-198.

35) Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 349.

36) Ibid.

37) The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:596.

38) Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1997), 71.

38) Ibid., 69.

40) Ibid., 66.

41) Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), 19:18.

42) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 611.

43) Ibid., 620.

44) Benjamin Franklin, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth (New York: MacMillan, 1905-1907) 9:139. In the full quote, he repeats himself for emphasis: “All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match coat, and other little acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention. Hence the public has the right of regulating decents, [sic] and all other conveyances of property, and even limiting the quantity and users of it. All the property that is necessary to a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of: but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. He can have no right to the benefits of society, who will not pay his club towards the support of it.” Again, the references towards “savages” sound hostile today, but remember that Franklin subverted the pejorative use of the term in his “REMARKS Concerning the Savages of North America” which was clearly intended to shame his fellow Europeans. Also recall that the First Nations did not practice individual landownership, so I suspect there is a little joke here. “Going Galt” and fleeing into the wilderness to escape taxation does not secure ownership. Like that tiger, you are just another figure on the landscape. And that was Franklin’s point: Property requires society.

45) Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. J.A. Leo LeMay and P.M. Zall (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), 222.

46) Caitlin Ginley and Eric Hananoki, “Fox-Approved Convention Theme Contradicted by Publicly Financed Site,” Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/22/fox-approved-convention-theme-contradicted-by-p/189507 (accessed January 26, 2013).

47) Caitlin Ginley, “How She ‘Built It’: Fox's RNC Theme Undercut by Key Speaker’s Business Success,” Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/23/how-she-built-it-foxs-rnc-theme-undercut-by-key/189537 (accessed January 26, 2013).

48) Thomas Paine, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine: includes Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1993), 340.

49) Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William B. Willcox (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 22:533.

50) Henry P. Rosemont, “Benjamin Franklin and the Philadelphia typographical strikers of 1786,” Labor History 22, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 398-429.

51) Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or The General Advertiser, November 26, 1776, 2. Available on microfilm reel 94 of the American Periodical Series.

52) Benjamin Franklin, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth (New York: MacMillan, 1905-7), 10:59. One pamphlet found among Franklin’s papers was a list of principles for reforming the British system of government. It was entitled “A Declaration of those RIGHTS of the Commonalty of Great Britain, without which they cannot be FREE.” (emphasis original) The third item proclaimed “for the all of one man is as dear to him as the all of another; and the poor man has an equal right, but more need, to have representatives in the legislature than the rich one.” (again, italics original) Benjamin Franklin wrote on his copy “Some good Whig principles.” (Ibid.,10:130) Incidentally, Franklin’s first foray into public affairs was an attempt to put Philadelphia’s night watch tax on a sliding scale. He thought it was unfair that “a poor Widow Housekeeper, all of whose Property to be guarded by the Watch did not perhaps exceed the Value of Fifty Pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest Merchant who had Thousands of Pounds-worth of Goods in his Stores.” Accordingly, he proposed “a Tax that should be proportion’d to Property.” Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Library of America, 1990), 101.

53) George Washington, The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, ed. W.W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 5:257.

54) Lester C. Thurow, Building Wealth: The New Rules for Individuals, Companies, and Nations in a Knowledge-based Economy (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 14.

55) Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 97.

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