Thomas Jefferson's advice on how to lessen the inequality between

[JDPriestly]

rich and poor. Note that this letter was written not long before the terrible violence of the French Revolution.

At the time that Jefferson wrote this letter to good friend, James Madison, Jefferson was living in France. It is printed as a single paragraph in the on-line source. I divided it into paragraphs for easier reading. Certainly, Thomas Jefferson for one would condemn the current extreme inequality in the division of wealth in our country because so many Americans are unemployed and have not land.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

28 Oct. 1785
Papers 8:681--82

Seven o'clock, and retired to my fireside, I have determined to enter into conversation with you; this is a village of about 5,000 inhabitants when the court is not here and 20,000 when they are, occupying a valley thro' which runs a brook, and on each side of it a ridge of small mountains most of which are naked rock. The king comes here in the fall always, to hunt. His court attend him, as do also the foreign diplomatic corps. But as this is not indispensably required, and my finances do not admit the expence of a continued residence here, I propose to come occasionally to attend the king's levees, returning again to Paris, distant 40 miles. This being the first trip, I set out yesterday morning to take a view of the place. For this purpose I shaped my course towards the highest of the mountains in sight, to the top of which was about a league.

As soon as I had got clear of the town I fell in with a poor woman walking at the same rate with myself and going the same course. Wishing to know the condition of the labouring poor I entered into conversation with her, which I began by enquiries for the path which would lead me into the mountain: and thence proceeded to enquiries into her vocation, condition and circumstance. She told me she was a day labourer, at 8. sous or 4 d. sterling the day; that she had two children to maintain, and to pay a rent of 30 livres for her house (which would consume the hire of 75 days), that often she could get no emploiment, and of course was without bread. As we had walked together near a mile and she had so far served me as a guide, I gave her, on parting 24 sous. She burst into tears of a gratitude which I could perceive was unfeigned, because she was unable to utter a word. She had probably never before received so great an aid.

This little attendrissement, with the solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe.

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. Whenever there is 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 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.

It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html

[Wabbajack_]

1. Didn't he feel the rich should own the poor?

[soverywendy]

2. To hell with this slave-owning jackass/

Oh, then there's the small matter of the slaves he fucked, the slave children he fathered and never freed.
Jefferson: the complete American asshole.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bandit]

5. Right, I'm sure yours is a much greater mind and beneift for American society.

No person is perfect but each has wisdom to promote.

[soverywendy]

6. Sorry, I've never owned anyone

then written about how bad it is to own people.

[izquierdista]

8. Only because you live in this century

I'm sure that 3 centuries from now, if your writings were compared with your life, that you too would look like a hypocritical jackass.

[truedelphi]

14. Let's think about this for a second

The clothes on your back were created by children in Bangladesh, or India or China or Hondorus or...

In India, right now, and Thailand, parents who are poor offer their children up to the factory owners of the textile mills, and for that sum of money, their children will now live at the factory, working most of their hours, sleeping in a small cot when they're not.

You benefit from those actions by the cheap cost of clothes at our stores in the USA.

You use transit means of some sort - most likely, the gas and oil from that vehicle has been stolen via IMF for this nation's purposes, and people have died in whatever nation is being robbed, offering their hard scrabble lives so that perhaps things will change and someday their people will see the monetary profits of that gas and oil. In the meantime, the rich are richer and the poor are poorer, and have hard and desperate lives.

Perhaps you had coffee at some point in the past week. Central America is now so overrun with coffee plantations, that the poor children in rural areas have little in the way of food. And die of starvation. Back when Central America was ripe with mainly US owned banana plantations, the poor parents could gather that fruit, and although we would see children as eating bananas to be undernourished, the fact is that they still would survive. Now they die, because coffee is not something that will aid a child to avoid death from starvation. Coffee has zero calaories and zero nutrition.

I could go on, but perhaps you get my point. You don't need to own slaves, because the world's monetary system provides them for you.

The system works so well you don't even have to think about this exploitation until it is pointed out to you.

[Leftist Agitator]

17. That was an excellent response.

+1

[soverywendy]

19. You are clueless

[ret5hd]

22. What a cogent argument!!!

:rofl:

[HughMoran]

7. bye

simpleton

[fascisthunter]

9. good bye

[ecstatic]

10. Welcome to DU & I agree with you

This guy BOUGHT, OWNED, and RAPED human "slaves." I guess to him, slaves weren't even human so they didn't factor in to his ponderings about the rich and the poor. :eyes:

[JDPriestly]

12. If you read Jefferson's writings, you learn that he, like many others

at his time, viewed people with African ancestry as not really people. The abolitionist movement did not become a real movement until sometime around 1776. It began in England.

We are all, to a great extent, the products of our time and culture.

If universal health care is instituted in this country, there will be a day when Americans look back and shake their heads and point their fingers and say, "What monsters they were to prevent people from getting diagnostic care early enough to save their lives? What criminals!"

http://books.google.com/books?id=JndLInWWjx4C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=abolitionist+movement+origins+1776+london&source=bl&ots=Pg9nwOgb7r&sig=7gqEGo8mO9dE8DCHju6lCWMKvpg&hl=en&ei=9qaaSrjcDZngsAPKr_jZBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=&f=false

This is a book on the abolitionist movement. The slave trade was first abolished in Portugal in 1761. That only became a real movement some years later.

[Selatius]

3. He wasn't alone in thinking excessive concentration of wealth was bad. Thomas Paine thought so, too.

"I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene."

[Delphinus]

20. A line in a song:

The needs of the many are the sins of the few (or something really, really close).

[DLnyc]

11. This is why the estate tax, particularly on very large estates, was a

very important piece of tax policy. It was designed, as I understand it, to prevent the concentration of wealth. Estates under a few million, say, should NOT be the target of the tax. Estates of hundreds of millions or billions should -- the tax should be designed to break up excessively large fortunes and prevents the creation of a 'royalty' class.

[pitohui]

13. well this is a particularly bad example, i must say

the world was different in jefferson's time, if we were allow everyone "without land" to squat on public wilderness, we could kiss our already very limited public wilderness good-bye

the forest will be completely gone soon enough, visit a country that is already largely deforested NOW (say kenya) and have a look around about how well it works to allow people to do subsistence farming/ranching on every inch of possible land, to the point where you can't even raise a chicken and the only animal that survives are the goats -- because goats can eat thorns!

the world is not poorer because some amount of land was set aside for "game"/hunting -- the world is richer for it

if not for "game"/hunting, there wouldn't have been a patch of forest in the u.k. that survived into the mid 19th century -- hell, wide swatchs of the eastern/southeastern usa would have been completely deforested before any of us were born if not for game/hunting

you cannot make the whole world into a subsistence farm and have the world be anything except a hell of ugliness and struggle

jefferson had a lot of ideas, why not focus on a good one, rather than a shitty one like, "ok, let's ship all the poor people out to work the public lands!!!"

hell, look at any country where poor people go where they like and farm, using slash and burn agriculture, they destroy the land and they destroy their own future, and then it's all floods and mudslides forever (haiti is an infamous example, lots of honduras not much better)

[laughingliberal]

15. Land was the means to wealth in his day

That has changed but I think the applicable comparison today would be the estate tax to prevent the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. The other part of that is the progressive tax system.

[JDPriestly]

18. The essence of it is not that everyone should have land even

after land becomes scarce, but rather that everyone has the right to the opportunity to earn their living. I assume that Jefferson would support a livable minimum wage, graduated income tax and estate taxes that discouraged the accumulation of a great portion of our national wealth by a small portion of our society. He would, in my estimation, have supported Social Security and health care for all as well as access to public education for all. I have responded to the criticisms about Jefferson's ownership of slaves. That was a horrible thing, but it was quite typical for the time. It was not, of course, universal. Not even in the south. A few southerners freed their slaves. I believe that George Washington freed his slaves upon his death (and at least one of them earlier). I have also read that Thomas Jefferson planned to free his slaves on his death but could not do so because his estate was in too much debt and his choices about what to do with his property could not be honored. That is my understanding.

[Laelth]

16. Excellent reading. Thanks. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[Xenotime]

21. Why can't we have a society where the poor rule over the rich?