A lot has been said almost our founding fathers in recent years. The Tea Party has all of the sudden become historical scholars.  They have go the defenders of our Country and our Constitution. Glenn Brook is their proverbial historical professor.  Unfortunately their noesis is fairly limited to specifically what their Pull a fast one on News comrade regurgitates.

In 1797, Paine wrote a pamphlet called "Agrarian Justice". Information technology was his final great pamphlet and it was addressed to the French legislature, itself in the throes of revolution. While he addressed the pamphlet to the French legislature, he meant the plan in it to be universal, as he said in his accompanying alphabetic character:

The program independent in this work is non adjusted for any particular land lonely: the principle on which it is based is full general. But as the rights of human being are a new report in this earth, and ane needing protection from priestly imposture, and the insolence of oppressions also long established, I have thought it right to place this niggling work under your safeguard.

Paine starts his proposal by discussing poverty. First of all, he says poverty is not natural:

"Poverty, therefore, is a matter created past that which is chosen civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural land is without those advantages which catamenia from agriculture, arts, scientific discipline and manufactures."

Paine decries the disparity of income only I have and many other liberals have today:

"Culture, therefore, or that which is and so-called, has operated ii 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 country."

He accepts as a basic principle that:

"the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilisation commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born earlier that period."

This thought is the aforementioned blazon of thought that nosotros have today every bit Americans, Nosotros want the adjacent generation to have a better standard of living than we had.

When Thomas Paine wrote this, unfortunately, this was non the example in 18th century Europe.

It is a position not to exist controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and always would have continued to exist, the common property of the human race. In that country every human would have been born to belongings. He would accept been a joint life proprietor with residual in the belongings of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and brute.

Thomas Paine in the next paragraph plans how to solve this problem:

Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no ameliorate term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.
The holding owners owe hire to those who practise not ain property for the privilege of cultivating the land, and taking away the natural buying that all people have.

In my view, Thomas Paine is calling for Property taxes, and the the use of holding revenue enhancement to help the community as a whole.

In fact, Paine directly challenges the justification for pure private property with no community responsibilities:

There could be no such thing equally landed property originally. Human did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate equally his property in perpetuity any part of information technology; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the start championship-deeds should issue.

Paine proceeds to justify individual property on the mutual grounds that tillage is important, but not without community responsibilities in exchange for permission to cultivate:

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever fabricated by human invention. Information technology has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with information technology has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, every bit ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist earlier

And just equally today'due south liberals continue do argue against the idea that they are merely trying to institutionalize charity or welfare, Paine rejected the idea that he was advocating for charity at all. Instead, he was advocating for a positive correct.

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and non a charity, that I am pleading for. Only it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwords till heaven had opened the mode past a revolution in the system of government. Let the states then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles past blessings

In other words, Paine considers a primary purpose of authorities to be remedying the issues of the marginalized poor equally a fundamental correct non as a form of institutionalized clemency or welfare state.

In case you lot remember this was all just an hypothesis, Paine finishes off with a detailed plan of how to move forward. His proposal:

To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-i years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in office, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed holding:

And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person at present living, of the historic period of fifty years, and to all others as they shall make it at that age.

This proposal sounds like a national alimony program, similar to Social Security. Later on, Paine also argues for the aforementioned 10 pound payment to be made to the disabled. By comparison, a housewife could brand between 6 and 8 pounds for a year.

But how is a country expected to enhance enough money to give every citizen that much money upon turning 21, and pay living expenses for the elderly and disabled? The answer is an estate tax, inheritance tax or every bit the conservatives like to phone call information technology the Decease TAX.

Taking it and so for granted that no person ought to exist in a worse status when built-in nether what is chosen a state of civilization, than he would take been had he been built-in in a state of nature, and that civilization ought to have made, and ought withal to make, provision for that purpose, it tin only be washed past subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed.

Various methods may exist proposed for this purpose, merely that which appears to be the best is at the moment that belongings is passing by the death of i person to the possession of another. In this instance, the bequeather gives nothing: the receiver pays nix. The only matter to him is that the monopoly of natural inheritance, to which there never was a correct, begins to cease in his person. A generous homo would not wish it to go along, and a only homo will rejoice to encounter information technology abolished.

Paine covers what kind of "revolution" he would like to run into."

It is non charity simply a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is every bit odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the contrary of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The dissimilarity of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care every bit footling about riches as any homo, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good.

This quote by Thomas Paine is very like to what I believe. Unfortunately through trickle downward economics of the past
thirty years nosotros have seen people lose their jobs through outsourcing in order to increase the abundance of a few.

"I intendance not how flush some may exist, provided that none be miserable in issue of it. Just information technology is incommunicable to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of existence enjoyed, while and so much misery is mingled in the scene."
Many on the right call for charity to help the poor rather than gild. While it has it's good intentions, information technology is just not enough.

Hither Thomas Paine explains:

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, nevertheless, but fiddling that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to exist relieved is considered. He may satisfy his censor, but non his center. He may requite all that he has, and that all will salve but lilliputian. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a organisation of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery tin be removed.

In other words, regime, through tax, and proposals such equally the one he's outlining here, are the only solution to the problem. In fact, he argues that a prime number purpose of authorities is to resolve vast income inequality.

Over again arguing for this plan as role of the French Revolution, Paine points out that by helping the poor, France will exist better off in the end:

A plan upon this principle would benefit the revolution past the energy that springs from the consciousness of justice. It would multiply also the national resources; for property, similar vegetation, increases by offsets. When a young couple begin the globe, the divergence is exceedingly great whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a moo-cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of state; and instead of becoming burdens upon society, which is always the case where children are produced faster than they tin be fed, would exist put in the fashion of becoming useful and profitable citizens.

In other words, we can resolve the burden on social club by vast poverty by but making information technology easier for the impoverished to start life with something, instead of being trapped in the bike of poverty. Almost sounds like a modern-twenty-four hours liberal, doesn't he?

Further, he argues that it's not enough to help the poor once they go poor–we must fundamentally change the weather that unjustly produce poverty.

It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of civilization (and the practise claim non to be called either charity or policy) to make some provision for persons becoming poor and wretched only at the fourth dimension they become so. Would it not, even as a affair of economic system, exist far amend to adopt means to foreclose their becoming poor? This tin best be done by making every person when arrived at the age of xx-1 years an inheritor of something to brainstorm with.

Information technology is cheaper to fix the larger problem of poverty than information technology is to employ failing band-aids on top of the problems of the impoverished.

This item quote, Thomas Paine responds in advance of the wealthy who will well-nigh likely attack him for advocating for a social safety net. He did this past telling them that they were in favor of war, which costs more in taxes than the Social Security, disability payments, and inheritance that he is proposing.

It is from the overgrown acquisition of property that the fund volition support itself; and I know that the possessors of such belongings in England, though they would eventually be benefitted by the protection of nine-tenths of it, will exclaim confronting the plan. Merely without entering any inquiry how they came by that holding, let them remember that they have been the advocates of this war, and that Mr. Pitt has already laid on more new taxes to be raised annually upon the people of England, and that for supporting the despotism of Austria and the Bourbons confronting the liberties of France, than would pay annually all the sums proposed in this program.

So, you meet or forefathers like Thomas Paine were not conservative in a sense of advocating for Economic Darwinism and individualism. There are many more quotes from various founding fathers all the way to today's leaders and advocates.

Today we are all the same fighting the fight that led to Thomas Paine writing this pamphlet and nosotros must go on, no matter what the cost.