Thomas Jefferson was in France as Secretary of State just prior to the French Revolution. He saw the conditions that would eventually lead to that revolution and was taken: the hoarding of wealth, poor who could barely scrape up the wages for a meal, workers exploited by the rich for no good purpose.
He wrote James Madison a letter about these appalling conditions:
The property of this country is absolutely concentrated 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 laboring.
They employ also a great number of manufacturers and tradesmen, and lastly the class of laboring husbandmen. But after all there comes the most numerous of all classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work.
Jefferson could describe what's happening today in the same terms. What did one of Founders think of the horrible conditions in France?
I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable.
He ain't no Socialist.
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.
But he saw that something must be done by government to intervene in the corrupt accumulation of a nation's wealth.
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 or property in geometrical progression as they rise.
Geometrical progression - I love it. Blanche Lincoln would hate it.
And what if government does not act in the face these vast inequalities and instead lets the Economic Royalists thrive?
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed.
Jefferson had it right when he saw what was going on in France. No doubt one of the greatest philosophers of the previous millenium would be called a Socialist and be accused of hating the very country he helped create. And he knew even then, before there was a middle class, that America can only exist with a thriving Middle Class. He said it in that letter to Madison:
The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.
Any of you who have The Thomas Jefferson Hour on your radio station would know I heard about Jefferson's letter there this weekend. It's show 848 Inequality of Income:
President Jefferson discusses property ownership, natural rights and the effects of inequality of income among citizens. He recalls recalls a letter he wrote to James Madison about meeting a common laborer during a trip to Fontainebleau, France.
If you have an hour, or have never heard Clay Jenkinson, listen to this as soon as practicable, Dear Citizen, for this lesson in patriotism will awaken your eyes to how profound a thinker and democrat Thomas Jefferson was. Barack Obama could learn a thing, too.