I'm not one for deification. I don't worship gods, let alone men. So, I'm always a bit put off by the way the views of the founders are represented as some kind of infallible revelation. As Thomas Paine noted in The Age of Reason "[Even] admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it." To my mind the constitution is a flawed document written by flawed men, subject to the vicious bigotries and biases of their day. However, I think it is important to realize that they upheld some of the highest ideals of the enlightenment, including some that are now recognizably progressive.
To tell the story how I want to tell it, you have to go back to the Diggers' Revolt. I like the way the story is told in this old folk song, performed here by the inestimable Billy Bragg:
Why do I think that the Digger are crucial to understanding the progressive ideas that influenced our founders? Well, because I think that we need to understand John Locke's political philosophy, outlined in his Two Treatises on Government to grasp the influences on our founders. I hypothesize that Locke cannot have had 17th century levelers movements far from his mind when he wrote on the foundation of property rights. Locke's conservative admirers often quote his words on the foundation of the right of property on the right to security in one's person. Locke argued that property rights derived from mixing one's labor with the land, so that a violation of property was a violation of the person whose worked had been mixed in. However, many conservatives ignore or downplay the proviso that Locke added (a notable exception is the political libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick):
Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
-Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, paragraph 33
The right to appropriate land was, in Locke's eyes, only justified insofar as there was "as much and as good" left over for others. As soon as a dispossessed class emerges in modern society, with no access to land, retributions are warranted. I think Locke must have intended his proviso as at least a partial vindication of the Diggers' grievances. In 17th and 18th century Europe a landed aristocracy ruled over a dispossessed peasantry without "as much and as good" to claim as their own.
The unjust social situation in Europe was a clear influence on our founders. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson wrote:
The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, and tradesmen, and lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured. 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, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.
-Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 Oct. 1785
Conservatives often note that Jefferson, when he became president, sought to abolish internal taxation, but they fail to note that his reasons for wishing to do so are far from their own "trickle-down economics", which Jefferson would have recognized as a servile rationalization of economic royalists. No, Jefferson wished to have only excise taxes because at the time only the wealthy consumed imports. Hence excise taxes were inherently progressive at the time. You can just hear the cries of "soshulizzm" from the Tea Party if a contemporary politician explicitly argued that the wealthy should be taxed to support benefits to the common man, but this is exactly what Jefferson said in support of his taxation scheme:
"The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. ... Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings."
-Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811
To be sure, today one would choose a different means to achieve a progressive tax code, because today it is no longer the case that "the rich alone use imported articles" but the point stands that conservatives have simply confused the means for the ends when it comes to their comprehension of Jefferson's progressive views on taxation. Indeed, returning to the letter to Madison, Jefferson supported the use of taxes to maintain full employment:
The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 Oct. 1785
The influence of Locke is clear, and specifically of the "as much and as good" proviso. Now, here is where the biases and bigotry of the time come into the picture. Jefferson, like most white Europeans, perceived the expansive North American continent as fallow land, and for broadly Lockean reasons believed that white Europeans had a right to bring it under cultivation. There is no defending this view, but the point I am making is that it is worthwhile to note the progressive ideas about class and aristocracy in Europe that were tragically perverted into entitlement and appropriation in North America.
Thomas Paine had a, perhaps, more (ahem) enlightened view of the native population, though one, perhaps, a bit tainted by the myth of the noble savage. My intent, however, is not to go into the history of civilization in North America, though I do wish to include the following quote from a text written by Paine that I want to discuss, the essay Agrarian Justice:
"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."
-Agrarian Justice
Paine perceived poverty as a product of the appropriation of land concomitant with the growth of settlement and civilization. While he recognized that cultization of land, and along with it private property rights, were necessary to increase productivity, he held that this was an instrumental justification and therefor it was a right that came with a responsibility and which was secondary to a more fundamental right:
"It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.
But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. 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."
-Agrarian Justice
Echoing Locke and Jefferson, Paine argued for a progressive and redistributive taxation scheme with a common benefit derived to support the general welfare. This has been recognized as a forerunner of the Social Security system. However, Social Security is not as redistributive as Paine imagined. Again, just picture the rightwing freak out if a contemporary politician said in as plain of terms as Glenn Beck's favorite founding father did that property rights are secondary to "the common right of all" to the land.
Notably, conditions have changed dramatically since Jefferson and Paine's day. We cannot therefor translate the means each proposed for achieving progressive ends into the modern context. But the progressive ideas are clearly recognizable, and I cannot help but fantasize that our progressive founders would have stood with FDR and would stand with us today against the economic royalists who would push the North American continent further toward the feudalistic injustice they recognized and deplored in Europe.
With that, I leave you with two more folk songs.
Happy Fourth everyone. Don't forget whose land this is and never bow to royalists.