The Best of Thomas Paine

 

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.