by John Lawrence
Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, was the guy who put into words, so that the average person could understand it, the whys and wherefores of the American revolutionary cause. He was one of the founding fathers in the truest sense although he was later discredited by the Federalists and by conservatives ever since. He is the one who wrote the immortal words: "These are the times that try men's souls." His books and pamphlets sold in unheard of quantities for the 1770s. At the end of the revolutionary war, Paine was a popular hero.
But he went on from there to be involved in the French revolution and to try to foment revolution in Britain. In France he narrowly escaped the guillotine when the Jacobins instituted The Terror. Arriving back in America, a journey expedited by then President Thomas Jefferson, he continued to write such tracts as "The Rights of Man", "The Age of Reason" and "Agrarian Justice" in which he proposed a democratic system of addressing poverty by taxing the rich to provide grants for young people and pensions for the elderly.
Paine, a Deist as were many of the Founding Fathers, was excoriated by 18th century churchmen because, unlike the others, he made very public pronouncements about it especially in "The Age of Reason". Emigrating from England, Paine in his writings encouraged the nascent American polity to make a true revolution, to become truly independent, and not just merely call for a redress of grievances from England. An ablolitionist, he failed, however, to address those views in "Common Sense". "Common Sense" gave dramatic new meaning and momentum to the American cause and called for a true democracy.
However, not everyone was thrilled with Paines's egalitarianism and democratic spirit. John Adams and other conservatives distrusted "the people", and since Paine's appeal was to workingmen and farmers, they distrusted handing over the reins of government to a democratic rabble. Paine never claimed any royalties for his writings which at first were published anonymously. Paine eventually petitioned Congress for some redress for his efforts and was awarded a farm in New York State. He continued to write and be involved in politics.
The following is from Thomas Paines and the Promise of America by Harvey J Kaye:
"Paine did more than censure Britain's political order. Reviving the plan he had begun to formulate years earlier but had set aside in his encounter with America, he extended his radical-democratic thinking by outlining a series of welfare programs that a revolutionary change in government would afford. Along with suggesting a progressive estate tax to limit accumulation of property, he recommended raising the incomes of the poor by remitting their taxes and augmenting the sums, distributing special relief for families with children, creating a system of social security for the elderly, instituting public funding of education through a voucher system, providing financial support for newly married couples and new mothers, and establishing employment centers for the jobless."
He also rendered a most appealing image of the good society:
"When it shall be said in any country of the world, "My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government."
Even as Paine pushed radicalism in a social-democratic direction, he proclaimed, "I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects." It may seem odd to many of us today, but like many eighteenth-century radicals confronting the legacy of absolutism, Paine comprehended "political liberty and economic liberty" as mutually interdependent and imagined that economic freedom served to assure equality of opportunity and results. Witnessing monarchical regimes taxing the productive classes, transferring wealth to parasitic royals and aristocrats, and punishing working people and the poor, he personally had come to view nondemocratic governments, not markets, as the fundamental cause of social inequality and oppression. Consequently, he proposed the liberation of the market and expansion of commercial activity.
Commerce was, for Paine, "a pacific system, operating to unite mankind by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other ... If commerce was permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of government." As much as he appreciated the manifold potential of free markets, however, he did not hold that equality AND democracy must necessarily defer to the imperatives of commerce and trade. And as his revolutionary proposal for welfare-state policies attests, he increasingly realized that the democratic governments for which he fought would have to politically address inequality and poverty.
Paine came to see later that exploitation was not necessarily always at the hands of aristocratic governments, but was also carried out by the affluent to the detriment of the poor. He proposed a redistribution of income from the wealthy to the poor by means of taxes. He realized that the exploitation of labor led to the wealthy class on the one hand and the poor on the other. This is much the same pass as the US is coming to in the present age except for the fact that to a greater extent it is not the exploitation of labor so much as it is joblessness that is leading to the creation of an extended poverty class. Either wealth is redistributed from rich to poor or the economy comes to a grinding halt as jobs for the poor and middle class are being eliminated right and left and government cannot continue to borrow money to give to the jobless in order to prevent them from becoming destitute. Therefore, in order that the poor don't all become homeless serfs digging through garbage pails for their food, government has to play the role of distributing relief as well as paying for it and this is only possible by taxing those that have more money than any human could conceivably need in order not only to provide welfare but also to invest in infrastructure in order to create jobs.
Quoting from Kaye again:
"Back on his feet, Paine immediately set himself to writing a series of new pieces, including a highly original Agrarian Justice. He had come to see all the more clearly that inequality and poverty were the consequences not simply of exploitive systems of taxation and government expenditure but also of economic power and the payment of inadequate wages. 'Civilization,' he wrote, '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 the natural state ... [T]he accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence."
Paine refused to blame the poor for the economic circumstances to which they were reduced, for "poverty is a thing created by ... civilized life," which, he believed, did not exist "in the natural state." In the face of increasing disparities, he grew increasingly impatient: "The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and ... a revolution should be made in it." And even more strenulously than he had in Rights of Man, Paine propounded that society had an obligation to address material inequality and poverty through a system of public welfare. This "ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation," he insisted, and its aim should be to "preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced."
Paine had been led to write Agrarian Justice by Bishop Richard Watsin's sermon "The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both rich and poor," which Watson had included in his reply to The Age of Reason. "It is wrong to say God made both rich and poor," Paine responded. "He made only male and female; and He gave them the earth for their inheritance." Paine then held that since God had provided the land as a collective endowment for humanity, those who had come to possess the land as private property owed those who had been dispossessed of it - "on every principal of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization" - an annual ground rent. Specifically, he delineated a limited redistribution of income by way of a tax on landed wealth and property:
"To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age."
Because of Paine's radical views regarding welfare and especially his radical Deist views regarding religion, he was discredited and reviled and demonized by the conservatives of his day. When he died the Quaker cemetery would not accept his body for burial so he was laid to rest on his New York State farm with only a couple people in attendance. There were no public dignitaries.
The French woman Madame Marguerite de Bonneville, who had accompanied him back to America with her sons and tended him through his illnesses and final days, would recall:
"Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east of the grave, said to my son, Benjamin, 'stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America.' Looking around me, and beholding the small group of spectators. I exclaimed as the earth was tumbled into the grave, 'Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!' This was the funeral ceremony of this great politicain and philosopher!"
Thomas Paine had been expunged from the pantheon of the Founding Fathers because of his radical economic views and because of his publicly stated Deism. In later years his memory would be revived but he would never regain the status that he had during the Revolutionary War which was on a par with Washington, Jefferson anfd Franklin.
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