The following article comes from Paul Marks, regular commenter here. Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and others) is someone who, at one point, would have been as familiar to an American or Briton of decent reading as, say, the Founders, or a character such as Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Paine’s books were read as avidly as any social media post today, and were arguably far more influential and profound. Paine was immensely influential in his time. But he had serious flaws in his views, as Paul Marks argues, and was foolish in the extreme about the French Revolution and where it might lead. He ended up nearly losing his life in France.
Another person who wielded great influence in the ideas of the Founders was John Locke, the English writer. Views such as the idea that Man is a “self owner”, for example, and of how property legitimately comes into existence, are often associated with Locke.
I can recommend this book by Yuval Levin, comparing and contrasting Edmund Burke (who supported the American colonists in their bid for independence), and Paine. See also this book about the Founding by Timothy Sandefur, which readers might enjoy. And one more is America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C Bradley Thompson.
Of course, this sort of topic might appear “arcane” to some, but at a time when the Founding, and the the origins of the greatest free nation on earth, are sometimes questioned and even attacked, it is never a waste of time to re-visit the territory and learn new lessons.
Anyway, over to the “Sage of Kettering”:
Thomas “Tom” Paine is mocked for holding that it was wrong for monarchies to have fiat money (rather than gold and silver coin), and high taxes and lots of government spending – but just fine for democratically elected governments to-do-the-same-things. His position was indeed absurd – but what was the source of his specific economic position that high taxes, specifically high land taxes, should fund lots of benefits, education for the poor, old age pensions, money for the poor generally – and-so-on?
Well Adam Smith implied there was something special about land taxation – and David Ricardo and Henry George developed this idea long after the death of Mr Paine – and the idea was not fully refuted till the American economist Frank Fetter just over a century ago, although experience in Ireland in the 1840s where the British government tried to run the Poor Law welfare schemes by a land tax, assuming that this would just hurt “the landowners”, should have discredited the idea that taxing land is somehow special – in Ireland the economy totally collapsed and between a quarter and a third of the population either died or fled the country. But there is more to all this than just taking a few, false, hints from Adam Smith and running wild with them.
As far back as John Locke there was a mixing (by slight of hand) of individual consent and majority consent. Gough (Oriel Oxford about 70 years ago now) showed in his book on Locke that medieval thinkers understood the difference between majority consent and individual consent – and that Locke, in his “Two Treatises on Government” mixed them up – in order to imply that a government is not coercive if it has majority support, that you as an individual are not being coerced, no matter what government does to you, if you had a vote – if only one vote out of millions (a doctrine that makes no sense – but a doctrine that both Mr Paine and Rousseau before him, later ran wild with).
Nor is it just the political side – there is also an element of economic thinking that Mr Paine may (perhaps) have taken from John Locke. Locke held, contrary to Hugo Grotius (the Dutch theologian and legal thinker) and other theologians and legal thinkers, that God gave land (the world) to humanity in-common – rather than land being unowned till claimed (the Roman or Common Law position).
As Locke held (by his interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible – thinkers such as Hugo Grotius held to a very different interpretation) that the land was originally given to humans in-common, he held that private ownership had to be “justified” – either by “as much and as good left for others” (clearly impossible with a rising population) or by some sort of payment to meet the “Lockian Proviso” – see how Mr Paine might get the idea of a land tax and various benefits funded by it, from this position of John Locke? Although, yes, Thomas Paine rejected Christianity – and it was from his interpretation of Christianity (opposed by many other Christian thinkers) that Locke got his ideas, in this area, from.
John Locke even held that if a ship’s captain with a cargo of food refused to sell it in a port where there starving people, seeking a better price at another port, the captain was “guilty of murder” – seemingly oblivious to the fact that this would (given there have always been hungry people in some part of the world) bid the price of food down to zero, bankrupting not just the captain – but also the farmers. It is also just legally wrong – as the captain may (may) be a very morally bad person (lacking in the virtue of charity – mercy), but he is NOT “guilty of murder” as any lawyer (of either English Common Law or Roman Law) could have told Mr Locke.
So, in all this, if (if) ideas are developed in a certain way it is quite possible to go from John Locke (supposedly the founder of English liberalism) to the Collectivism of Thomas Paine or even Rousseau – and of the French Revolution rather than individual private property based American Revolution. This is one of the reasons why American Founding Fathers such as Roger Sherman and John Adams were so opposed to Thomas Paine.
There are many Great Thinkers who start off with the belief that there is an Almighty God who happens(!) to have the same attitudes as their own and therefore various things *should* follow.
That other Great Thinkers have the same belief but draw different conclusions is seen to be a lack in the strength of the others’ faith rather than a flawed premise of their own.
I’m glad to see an argument against Locke’s views on property, which I’ve always found a poor model for libertarian ideas. Its provisos are essentially socialistic.
I’ve seen the rule of ownership specified as “finders keepers,” and I think that’s closer to accurate. But a still better model lies in the common law principle of adverse possession: If you occupy and use an asset for a span of time, and others tolerate your doing so, then you become its owner and have a right to continue occupying and using it, which the law should protect. You have to fence off land if people start walking or driving over it; you have to protest if someone uses your trademark on their product. The law isn’t designed to reach back into the infinite past and return Israel to the Canaanites (or their descendants) or even Canada to the various tribal peoples; it’s designed to enable us to enjoy, now, the security of title that Hume says is essential to a free and prosperous society.
It is interesting that Grotius, a Dutchman, hel such a view as to the “origin” of land. Perhaps not surprising considering how much of The Netherlands is very definitely the creation of Men, not Gods!
LVT is an interesting idea because of course measures of wealth have changed dramatically over the years. Land of course in the Days of Yore, then production (the “of what” has of course changed) and now maybe Bitcoin. Is it possible that, unlike the physical sciences, certain aspects of the rules of economics are not immutable over time? That is a big question which I shall not pursue because 1. I don’t know enough and 2. It’s lunchtime.
Anyway, as to what is taxed, I’m reminded of the (apocryphal) quote from Michael Faraday. When he demonstrated his electrical stuff to Gladstone (then Chancellor) at the Royal Society the great statesman asked, what use it was? Faraday replied, “One day Sir, you may tax it”
When thinking about Locke’s views on ownership, it is crucially important to recognize that in his second Treatise he was fairly obviously trying (and failing) to deal with the moral and practical problems of slavery, in which he really was involved, not only through his employment with Shaftesbury, which brought him shares in the Royal African Company, but also in his work in writing the constitution for (slave-owning) Carolina. Although the Second Treatise was published in 1689, it was written much earlier, in 1660. If you read it now, you can see how very directly the structure of the Treatise is dictated by Locke’s attempts to rationalize the form of ownership which was slavery. You can also see how and why he failed, by conflating the indentured servitude upon which Britain’s West Indian colonies were originally founded, with full-blown chattel slavery.
Acknowledging the central importance of slavery in Locke’s political development may now be very unpopular, but I challenge anyone to read the Second Treatise and not recognize what it occupying his extraordinary mind.
https://michael665.substack.com/p/interlude-john-locke-as-og-tortured
“But since no man has the right to destroy himself…”
Well, he lost me at the very first line. I believe in the absolute sovereignty of the individual, and that absolute sovereignty includes the absolute right to destroy oneself. It is absolutely none of my business what some other person does with their own sovereign body.
NickM: It is interesting that Grotius, a Dutchman, hel. such a view as to the “origin” of land. Perhaps not surprising considering how much of The Netherlands is very definitely the creation of Men, not Gods!
You may have written this a slightly light-hearted way, but it an astute point: The Dutch achievement negates one of the premises of land collectivists, of all stripes, that land just “exists” and is a “gift from God/insert as desired” and therefore the presumption should be against private ownership unless on a very strict mathematical, egalitarian, model.
Yes, the Dutch and other countries that reclaimed land (Singapore has done quite a bit, as The Wobbly Guy might note), did so in part as a public effort involving the state, but there would be nothing to stop private businesses doing this if the benefits in terms of agricultural production and other land use offset the costs over time. (The creators of the Dutch Republic, great men they were, would have been unamused by the recent government attempt to cut ag. production by the use of fertilisers and modern forms of livestock management.)
Being short of a lot of land, the Dutch, once enriched by their trade and commercial acumen, did of course spread out into the eastern seaboard of North America (New Amsterdam, later NYC), and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), aka the “spice islands”. But they got rich to start with through sheer entrepreneurial gumption, not conquest. This also undermines the premise of books such as the 1619 Project, which says many great Western nations owed their riches to slavery. The Dutch showed that you can get mega-rich without it. Ditto the Venetian Republic.
I’m just gonna quote Spencer on this, because I always do and he said it do well:
“Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to everything his representative may do, when he voted for him.
But suppose he did not vote for him; and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected some one holding opposite views—what then?
The reply will probably be that, by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority.
And how if he did not vote at all? Why then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition.
So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said yes, whether he said no, or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine this.
Here stands an unfortunate citizen who is asked if he will pay money for a certain proffered advantage; and whether he employs the only means of expressing his refusal or does not employ it, we are told that he practically agrees; if only the number of others who agree is greater than the number of those who dissent.
And thus we are introduced to the novel principle that A’s consent to a thing is not determined by what A says, but by what B may happen to say!”
JP,
If light-hearted that was just my manner. It is an important point. In a sense there are modern issues not un-related such as pretty much the entire Green agenda which is so often couched not just in national (state) terms but global ones. This of course merely assumes that the private ownership of land is the Road to Hell. From my experience privately owned land tends to be much better looked-after by people who personally really have a dog in the fight than by government (or supra-governmental) “entities”.
And then there is stuff “out there”… OK, no need to worry just yet but what of the ownership of Mars or the Moon (or beyond)?* I think there are a lot of people who hate Elon Musk because of the prospect of him becoming the “Emperor of Barssom”. I doubt that’ll happen but if the alternative is the Peoples’s Democratic Republic of Mars…
*Yes, I know of the “Outer Space Treaty” but countries signed-up to that when humans “out there” was just Star Trek.
Many years ago I found some odd passages in Locke – but then, of course, I found that many others had noticed such writings long before me.
Karan Vaughn was one of the leading scholars to pointed to the odd views of Locke both on property and on murder – of course not helping people is NOT murder, you may be a very bad person not to help the starving but you are not a murderer (otherwise we are all murderers – because there are hungry people in the world right now).
As for Locke’s view of the Book of Genesis – he was not alone in this view, that God gave the world to humanity in common – rather than creating the world and allowing individual humans to claim bits of it by occupation, but his was a MINORITY view. Most theologians and most Common Law and Roman Law thinkers did NOT hold that private ownership had to be “justified” by either “as much and as good” left for others, or some form of payments to the poor. After all, for example, most of Scotland had no Poor Law tax to 1845 – I suspect the Scots (say the clergymen who organised voluntary poor relief in Glasgow before 1845) of pre 1845 Scotland would have been bemused to hear they were not Christians (France did not have welfare benefits till the 20th century – indeed quite deep in to the 20th century.
It is quite odd reading English Classical School economists of the 19th century – in the sense that they are so insular, the do not seem to even know that a few miles over the channel there were no welfare benefits. Well they must have known – but it does not seem to have influenced their thinking.
As for Thomas Paine – what is one to say of a man who, quite rightly, says that monarchies must not do XYZ, but then holds it is O.K. (indeed highly desirable) for democratically elected governments to do the same things.
A confusion of majority consent with individual consent? Something that Gough (Oxford more than 70 years ago now) pointed out is in Locke as well.
Indeed it may, possibly, be where Rousseau got this confusion from.
But there was an important difference between Thomas Paine and Rousseau – and Rousseau’s followers (Rousseau himself was dead) in the French Revolution.
Thomas Paine was a sincere democrat – he really was. Whereas Rousseau paid lip service to “the people” – but really wanted “the Lawgiver” (himself – or someone like him) to have absolute power – and if the majority opposed the Lawgiver it meant that most people did not understand the true “General Will”. Yes Rousseau really was this bad – and so where his followers such as Robespierre.
Very interesting post and comments.
Of the 3 faults (by my count) that Paul Marks finds in Locke’s politics, perhaps the most pernicious (exerting the most negative influence later on) is the confusion between individual consent and majority consent.
By an interesting coincidence, just today i found this book about the American political tradition on Amazon.
(H/T Mark Tapscott at PJMedia.)
Key quote from the Amazon blurb:
It seems to me that this book is revelant to the present discussion — although i am probably not going to read it.
This is a good post and thanks for the reminder of the Levin book. I keep meaning to read it. For a long time I’ve thought Locke tremendously overrated, and Tom Paine to be a very dubious character.
I didn’t read Burke’s Reflections and Paine’s Rights of Man until my early 30s. I did think at the time that had I read both aged 18, I’d probably sympathised much more with Paine. But as I read them when I did, I was just left feeling that Paine’s thought was just simple and childish compared to Burke. Most charitably I could say Paine was a skilled propagandist.
Dumb question, related to the Dutch land reclamation, but doesn’t every multi-story building represent just such a multiplier of earth’s area that is available to us?
bobby b,
Not dumb at all! Changes in technology do change land value. Yours is a very good example*. Another might be oil. The oil under places like Arabia made that land worthless because of oil (it oozed-up making agriculture a nightmare) then fractional distillation comes along and uses for those fractions of crude and Bingo!. It goes all sorts of ways. The guano cliffs of Chile were once a kinda Gold-Rush and after the Haber-Bosch process they were just seabird shit. Oddly enough two things that happened around the same time – loosely. It is interesting because maybe it means you never know how valuable land is in the long run. And of course it isn’t just land… There are also things like deep-sea mining to consider. Or, in the far-ish future, the asteroid belt. For that we know it is valuable if the resources can be exploited. They can’t be now but much cheaper space-flight and then the game is afoot!
*The tech side of that is partially down to elevators, steel and AC power without which skyscrapers would have been difficult to say the least!
Laws versus morals. If I see a man beating a child to death across the street – a man I could best in a fight – and I don’t cross the street to stop it, I’ve likely broken no law.
Have I violated a moral principle? I think so.
Morals are hard. Laws are practical, and thus always just a weak and limited reflection of morality. Could Locke have been speaking of a moral principle rather than a legislated law?
bobby b – Locke was confusing the virtue of justice (from which law is derived) “to each their own”, with the virtue of mercy (or charity – benevolence), it is a dreadful botch – and a confusion that the old Spanish Scholastics (the “School Men” who mixed their knowledge of scripture with their knowledge of Aristotle and their own reason) did not fall into.
Snorri – yes to confuse majority consent with individual consent is horrible, “you have consented to your being burned alive – because most people do not like you and have voted for you to be burned alive”. Gough points out that Medieval thinkers made careful distinctions between individual consent and majority consent – but some (some) of the time, John Locke throws those distinctions away.
Just a thought that occurred to me a few hours ago.
It is possible that Locke’s faults were due to his trying to avoid the problems (contradictions?) of dogmatic libertarianism; such as the injustice of taxation and conscription, even though taxation and conscription are needed to preserve what liberty you have from Russian invasion.
Thus, if the majority decides to fight against Russian invasion, it can tax and conscript you — for your own freedom, you see!
There is something to this view, but i do not think that Locke articulated it in the most logically-consistent way.