(I can't draw right now, so I might as well talk.)
I'm always bemused when Repubs start in on "class war" and the redistribution of wealth. (And how articulate was Joe the "Plumber" on his reservations about Barack Obama and the whole "spread the wealth" thing!! I was impressed.)
I attended graduate school for several years working toward a master's in history, with an emphasis on the Early Republic. So, though it's been a while, I'm fairly up on the thoughts and theories of the Founding Fathers.
I just Googled "distribution of wealth, Madison, Jefferson" and was rewarded with a healthy list of what the Author of the Declaration of Independence and the Father of the Constitution might really think about this imminent "class war." (I wish it had been this easy back when I was in graduate school.)
Early on the list--check this out:
Dissent Magazine
What Would Jefferson Do?: How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down
By Lew Daly
Here are a couple of paragraphs that I think would give John McCain (and good ol' Joe) pause:
Noah Webster expressed this view in his 1787 tract An Examination into
the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution. As he wrote, "A
general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole
basis of national freedom . . . the very soul of a republic. When this
equality holds, the people will inevitably possess both power and
freedom. When it is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a
commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form." The same
understanding was shared by spokesmen for the numerous agrarian
regulation movements of the revolutionary era, a force that
contributed to Thomas Jefferson's political ascendancy in the 1790s. As
one regulator theorist argued in the Cumberland Gazette of Falmouth,
Maine, in 1786: "Equality of property is the life of a Republican
government; destroy that equality and the principles of the government
will be wholly corrupted, while the form remains a cloak for oppression
and tyranny." [emphasis mine]
In the revolutionary fervor of 1776, John Adams had agreed. "The only
possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of
equal Liberty and public Virtue," he wrote in a letter to James
Sullivan, "is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of
Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that
the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates." Such thinking
obviously shaped Jefferson's Draft Constitution for Virginia (1776),
which stipulated that every man without property (or without adequate
property) is entitled to fifty acres of public land upon reaching
adulthood and, even more striking, that no one else should be permitted
to appropriate public land. "Legislators cannot invent too many devices
for subdividing property," he later wrote in a letter to James Madison.
It never ceases to amaze me how ignorant so many prominent Republicans are about the founding of this country--and they're always harping on it!!