The Best of Thomas Paine
By Robert E. Wright
AIER
For the Bastiat Society
of Jacksonville, Florida
Perhaps Paine’s most famous words are “THESE are the times that
try men's souls,” part of a paragraph in the first of Paine’s American
Crisis pamphlet series that stirred George Washington’s troops to cross the
freezing Delaware River at night to strike the Hessian mercenaries encamped
outside Trenton, New Jersey. That daring counterattack saved the nascent
rebellion, part of an independence movement that Paine himself had given voice
to earlier that same year, 1776, in his pamphlet Common Sense, of which
more a little later.
“To try” simply means “to test,” but connotes something more
visceral and Biblical than a quill pen and paper examination. Stated in a more
gender neutral way, “these are the times that try the human soul,” and anyone
today, Right or Left, would be happy to apply it to 2020.
But the rest of the paragraph that Washington read to his
beleaguered troops does not fare so well today and hence is seldom quoted, let
alone considered. Let’s analyze it, one sentence at a time:
The summer soldier and
the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their
country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and
woman.
While a Neocon or Trumper might applaud this line, Paine is not
calling on Americans to serve the State, he is calling on them to aid American
Society, i.e., other Americans, not the government. That is because
Tyranny, like Hell, is
not easily conquered;
This is a great line that partisans can turn against against a
Jackson or a Lincoln, an Obama or a Trump, but as we will learn, tyranny for
Paine comes from government overreach, not the overreachings of a particular
bad man.
yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the
triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only
that gives every thing its value.
This truism is increasingly disputed today and something that
Paine himself later forgot when he suggested a Universal Basic Income scheme
later in his life in Agrarian Justice.
Heaven knows how to put
a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial
an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Freedom is of course no longer considered celestial by many, who
seek to force others to accept their view of the world.
Britain, with an army to
enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but to
BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOVER, and, if being bound in that manner, is not
slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth.
Today, everyone purports to disdain slavery, but only when it
refers to American chattel slavery. Other slaveries, including the political
slavery Paine invokes here, is glorious if “woke.”
Even the expression is
impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.
What is this God of which Paine speaks? I jest, of course, but
fear many today have little recollection, much less fear, of God. Another word
starting with the letters “g” and “o,” the government, is their Deity.
It is important to note here that Paine was raised a Quaker and in
Age of Reason espoused a form of Deism. He was no atheist and, if fact,
angered Christians not for denying the existence of God but rather for
chastising them for idolizing Jesus and Mary at the expense of Him, with a
capital H.
For Paine, that was just common sense, the title of his most
famous work. After a brief preface to that clarion call for American
Independence, Paine immediately juxtaposes “society” and “government”:
Some writers have so
confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction
between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former
promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter
negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other
creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
By society, Paine makes clear that he means voluntary association,
so the economy plus what is sometimes called “civil society” and is represented
by what we today call the non-profit sector. Voluntary association arises
spontaneously from our very nature, our “species being” as Karl Marx would
later call it.
Humans seek each other out because they have minds “unfitted for
perpetual solitude” and material wants that exceed their individual
capabilities. Working together, however, they can fulfill many social and
economic desires.
As their spontaneous society flourishes, however, some individuals
will raid rather than trade for what they want, taking rather than making. The
makers and traders will then band together for mutual support but as their
society continues to grow larger and more complex, they can no longer attend to
every piece of public business and still conduct their own business. So they
delegate their powers to government officials, some of whom use those powers,
ironically enough, to take and raid.
To prevent that unhappy outcome, Paine argues, governments should
be run by a group of people elected from the general population at frequent
intervals, with incumbents few. “Freedom and security” were the sole proper
ends of government, and who better to secure those ends than the people themselves?
From simple government would come simple solutions to governance
problems, Paine pointed out. “Not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures,”
the people could fix any problems. The British government then, like the
American government today, however, “is so exceedingly complex, that the nation
may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the
fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political
physician will advise a different medicine.”
He then dissects his homeland’s unwritten constitution, with many
keen insights and delightful turns of phrase sprinkled throughout. He dryly
notes, for example, that “the fate of Charles the First, hath only made kings
more subtle - not more just.” Charles literally lost his head in 1649, a
powerful check on the monarchy for sure, but how did kings achieve such power
that needed checking in the first place, Paine wondered, often literally aloud
as Common Sense was read to illiterates in taverns and public squares to
hasten the spread of its message of liberation.
“A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing
himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a
very paltry rascally original,” Paine noted, adding coyly, “It certainly hath
no divinity in it.”
To those fearful that an independent America could not thrive
without Britain, Paine retorted that “America would have flourished as much,
and probably much more, had no European power had any thing to do with her. The
commerce by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and
will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.” He correctly
predicted that a free America would be peaceful and prosperous, practically
invoking Adam Smith’s famous adage that all that is requisite to raise a
country from the lowest barbarism to opulence is “peace, easy taxes, and a
tolerable administration of justice.”
Paine also saw through the political spin that posited Britain as
the colonists’ “Mother Country.” “Europe, and not England, is the parent
country of America,” he noted, adding that “This new world hath been the asylum
for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every Part of
Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but
from the cruelty of the monster.”
It is difficult not to see the modern American presidency as a
sort of monarchy, and not just because of family dynasties like Bush and
Clinton and potentially Obama and Trump. POTUS simply has too much power,
upping the electoral stakes so much that those who would hold the throne will
play all sorts of deadly games to seize it. Some wish to upend the Constitution
by eliminating the electoral college or the independence of SCOTUS in order to
own the powerful post, which can be controlled by the same person for up to ten
years, and perhaps longer as we have no restrictions on the election of
spouses. Paine recognized the disruptive power of power, arguing that fighting
over the throne destabilized nations. “The crown itself is a temptation to
enterprising ruffians at home,” he noted, while pointing out that the cause of
war was political power, period. “The republics of Europe are all (and we may
say always) in peace. Holland and Switzerland are without wars, foreign or
domestic.” Modern America, though putatively a republic, has been at war,
literally or metaphorically, almost constantly since Pearl Harbor.
To limit the power of POTUS, Paine wanted to combine lottocracy
and democracy. Every year a randomly-chosen state would supply the president
that year, to be elected by national legislators from the chosen state’s
national delegation. No state could supply a POTUS until all others took their
turn. No Virginia dynasty on Paine’s watch! Moreover, Paine’s POTUS would
simply lead the executive branch of the government, not a potent party
phalanx.
“For as in absolute governments the king is law,” Paine explained,
“so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no
other,” be he called His Majesty or Mr. President.
Speaking of laws, Paine also called for a 60 percent supermajority
for their passage. That would have worked because the sole goal of his entire
national government would be “securing freedom and property to all men, and
above all things the free exercise of religion.” “He that will promote discord,
under a government so equally formed as this,” Paine wrote with his usual panache,
“would join Lucifer in his revolt.”
Paine was of course a brilliant writer and rhetorician but also a
deep thinker. The guy engineered steam engines and iron bridges as side
hustles! He also knew a lot about finance, helping to establish and then defend
the Bank of North America, the continent’s first joint-stock commercial bank,
from legislative assault. Unlike government fiat paper money, that bank’s
liabilities, its notes and deposits, were convertible into real money, gold and
silver, upon demand at fixed rates. Nevertheless, jealous Pennsylvania
politicians revoked its charter.
Presaging the decision in the 1819 SCOTUS Dartmouth case,
Paine distinguished between laws, which legislators could change when they saw
fit, and contractual acts, which were binding agreements, like deeds and
contracts, between two parties, one of which happened to be the government. If
any subsequent legislature could annul or change contractual acts, the
government could never borrow on advantageous terms or induce investors to
supply the capital of corporations like the Bank of North America. “It will
lead us,” Paine wrote in his 1786 pamphlet Dissertations on Government,
“into a wilderness of endless confusion and insurmountable difficulties.”
Nothing short of the “glory” of the Republic was at stake, because if the
government could renege on its promises individuals could become “the prey of
power” as “MIGHT” overcame “RIGHT.”
Properly understood, Paine’s political economy was Hamiltonian, or
perhaps we should say that Hamilton’s political economy followed that of Paine.
Already in 1776, while Hamilton was still an artillery officer, Paine argued
“No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond; and
when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.” Of course Hamilton while
Treasury Secretary called the debt the cement of the union and argued that a
national debt that was not excessive would be a blessing.
Paine and Hamilton also shared an affection for efficient
government. Harvey Flaumenhaft has a lovely book about Hamilton’s views and
actions called The Effective Republic. Paine quoted a now too little
known Italian thinker named Giancinto Dragonetti, who wrote “The science of the
politician consists in fixing the true point of happiness and freedom. Those
men would deserve the gratitude of ages, who should discover a mode of
government that contained the greatest sum of individual happiness, with the
least national expense.”
All of Paine’s best writings are about liberation, not just from
cruel and monstrous political parents, warmongering monarchs, and spendthrift
policymakers, but from all forms of arbitrary authority, including “the”
scientists and purveyors of fiat paper money. Reason and reality alone should
rule humankind, he argued in multiple contexts. All agree, until it comes time
for implementation. Then more “buts” appear than in a nudist colony. That is
because most policies, and policymakers, are partisans, the tools of political
cartels, not public servants.
“Every constituent,” Paine reminded readers of his 1786 Dissertations
on Government, “is a member of the Republic, which is a station of more
consequence to him than being a member of a party, and though they may differ
from each other in their choice of persons to transact the public business, it
is of equal importance to all parties that the business be done on right
principles; otherwise our laws and Acts, instead of being founded in justice,
will be founded in party, and be laws and Acts of retaliation; and instead of
being a Republic of free citizens, we shall be alternately tyrants and slaves.”
I fear the circumstances that led Paine to pen those words has
repeated itself, and will repeat itself again and again until our republic is
but a farce and its democracy as hollow as an old log. Ignorant jealous
lawmakers repealed the charter of the Bank of North America because supposedly
somebody alleged that the Bank was not consistent with “public safety” and the
lawmakers, without any understanding of the Bank’s operations and without
calling on the bankers to explain, repealed its charter. “Why should not the
House hear them,” Paine wondered, “unless it was apprehensive that the Bank, by
such a public opportunity, would produce proofs of its services and usefulness,
that would not suit the temper and views of its oppressors?”
Such “unfair proceedings and despotic measures,” perpetrated under
the guise of public health and safety again threaten to upend reason and
bolster tyranny in the name of public safety. To justify their extreme actions,
Pennsylvania lawmakers resorted to a set of self-contradictory claims “never
made, heard of, or thought of before.” They assumed their constituents dupes
and were proven correct in the assumption. Much the same happened in most
states across America this Spring in reaction to a dangerous, novel virus that
was not novel and dangerous only to a small percentage of the population.
The core problem, hinted at by Paine, is that a welfare state is
by definition corrupt because recipients dare not question their legislators.
“To hold any part of the citizens of the State, as yearly pensioners on the
favor of an Assembly,” Paine noted “is striking at the root of free elections.”
So, too, I would add, is eliminating the secrecy of ballots by allowing large
numbers of people to vote by mail.
I fear a return to what Paine calls rule by superstition in his
1791 The Rights of Man:
When a set of artful men
pretended, through the medium of oracles, to hold intercourse with the Deity,
as familiarly as they now march up the back-stairs in European courts, the
world was completely under the government of superstition. The oracles were consulted,
and whatever they were made to say became the law; and this sort of government
lasted as long as this sort of superstition lasted.
Today, “the” science has replaced superstition, but the effect on
liberty is just as deadly. To be ruled by pseudo-scientific superstition may be
superior to being ruled by the sword, but rule by “force and fraud” irritated
Paine, a student of the Enlightenment who sought rule by reason.
What would rule by reason look like? Paine leaves us many clues,
like keeping POTUS and legislators on a short leash. One particularly powerful
one, that I also espouse, is a 20 or 30 year sunset clause on every law. In
other words, laws should automatically expire unless explicitly renewed. “Such
as were proper to be continued,” Paine explained, “would be enacted again, and
those which were not, would go into oblivion.”
Ridding ourselves of political parties would
be a big help too. “As to parties,” Paine professed that he was “attached to no
particular one. There are such things as right and wrong in the world.”
Paine also understood the power of what would
later be called Pareto improving policies. “The plan here proposed,” he argued
in defense of his UBI plan, “will benefit all, without injuring any.” He was
wrong about that but at least he invoked a key principle that should guide the
policies of all governments rightly called limited, or not despotic.
I
leave you with some of the pithier quotations from this Best of Thomas Paine
book:
However
our eyes may be dazzled with snow, or our ears deceived by sound; however
prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple
voice of nature and of reason will say, it is right.
He
may accomplish by craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he cannot do by
force and violence in the short one. Reconciliation and ruin are nearly
related.
The
more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture. The rich are in
general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling
duplicity of a spaniel.
Immediate
necessity makes many things convenient, which if continued would grow into
oppressions. Expedience and right are different things.
The
despotic form of government knows no intermediate space between being slaves
and being rebels.
Where
knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.
A
committee of fortune-tellers is a novelty in Government.
Where
the treasure is, there will the heart be also.
The
evils of paper-money have no end. Its uncertain and fluctuating value is
continually awakening or creating new schemes of deceit. Every principle of
justice is put to the rack, and the bond of society dissolved.
A
body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted
by anybody.
To
reason with despots is throwing reason away.
We
are astonished when reading that the Egyptians placed on the throne a flint,
and called it their king. We smile at the dog Barkouf, sent by an Asiatic
despot to govern one of his provinces. ... The flint and the dog at least
imposed on nobody.
No
kind of labor, commerce, or culture, can be prohibited to any one: he may make,
sell, and transport every species of production.
Every
man may engage his services and his time; but he cannot sell himself; his
person is not an alienable property.
Public
credit is suspicion asleep.
Poverty
... is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in
the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those
advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science, and manufactures.
The
present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely
the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should
be made in it.
Governments
consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is
not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.
In
every other light, and from every other cause, is war inglorious and
detestable.
War
never can be the interest of a trading nation, any more than quarrelling can be
profitable to a man in business. But to make war with those who trade with us, is
like setting a bull-dog upon a customer at the shop-door.
