What Would Jefferson Do?

[Dan Clore]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1232
What Would Jefferson Do?: How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down
By Lew Daly

In the fall of 1964, Ronald Reagan went on national television to tell
the American people about a growing tyranny in their midst, �subtler,
but no less dangerous� than Soviet communism. He also told them to cast
their presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, who was ready to tame this
new political beast and put a stop to those people who would �trade our
freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state.� Now known simply as
�The Speech,� it was a performance that launched the extreme right wing
of the country from the political margins into the highest seats of
government. The resulting political realignment sharply affected how
wealth and power are distributed in our society.

Less often noted than his frightening analogies with communism was
Reagan�s view that the welfare state violated the �freedoms intended for
us by the Founding Fathers.� As Reagan declared in The Speech, �The
Founding Fathers knew a government can�t control the economy without
controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that,
it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come
to a time for choosing.�

The rhetorical device was simple. By comparing the welfare state with
the founders� dedication to limited government, free-market
conservatives fashioned a powerful tale of abandoned principles and even
tyrannical intent. The message was bracing, yet edifying: cutting taxes
and reducing public spending and regulation will bring us closer to what
the people who founded our country believed in 1776 and in the early
nation. By returning to limited government and laissez-faire economic
principles, we can protect our freedom, and America will be saved.

For the �New Right� movement inspired by Goldwater and Reagan after
1964, attacking the welfare state was a political reenactment of the
American founding�a revival, they claimed, of �Jeffersonian democracy.�
When they cut taxes, they talked about the Boston Tea Party. When they
opposed campaign finance reform, they argued that giving money to
politicians is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment:
limiting such money is no better than shutting down newspapers or
throwing people in jail for calling King George III a tyrant. Even
Milton Friedman joined the �founding principles� crusade, arguing in his
1980 bestseller Free to Choose that the modern Democratic Party is the
�greatest threat� to everything Thomas Jefferson believed in.

What these modern-day Jeffersonians hated most of all was government
redistribution. In his Independence Day oration at the Jefferson
Memorial in 1987, Reagan called for a new �economic bill of rights� to
liberate the people by privatizing government services and by reducing
taxes, regulation, and social spending. Charles Murray recapitulated
this theme in his Clinton-era jeremiad What It Means to Be a Libertarian
(1997), which begins with a long excerpt from Jefferson�s First
Inaugural Address and calls for the elimination of �all governmental
social-service programs and all income transfers in cash or kind.�

The Cato Institute, Washington�s leading free-market think tank, is
perhaps the most conspicuous new claimant to the founders� vision.
According to the mission statement on its Web site, its agenda of
privatizing federal entitlement programs, flattening the tax code and
exempting wealth from taxation, deregulating industry and finance, and
slashing federal discretionary spending by 30 percent (for a start) is
inspired by a �Jeffersonian philosophy� of limited government.

Such thinking sounds right to many people because it is rarely
challenged on its own historical merits. Most progressives seem to
accept the conservative argument that our modern, active government,
resting on political foundations laid in the New Deal era, goes far
beyond what the founders could have contemplated or their principles
allowed. For example, Michael Tomasky�s much-discussed American Prospect
essay �Party In Search of a Notion� (April 2006) advises a return to the
notion of the �common good.� But he goes no further than the New Deal in
defining what this means, as if it is strictly a modern invention.

Ironically, Franklin D. Roosevelt�s own ideas about government took a
much longer historical view, squarely confronting the seeming
contradiction between extensive public welfare and early American ideals
of limited government. Consider his extraordinary acceptance speech at
the 1936 Democratic Convention, in which he challenged the forces of
�economic royalism,� then rallying in a business propaganda group called
the American Liberty League. Over waves of euphoric cheering from the
100,000 people gathered to hear him in Philadelphia�s Franklin Field,
Roosevelt hailed his battle against business domination as a second
coming of the American Revolution. �Our allegiance to American
institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power,� he declared.
The argument was philosophically radical in a liberal society: private
power, no less than public power, inevitably leads to tyranny and
destruction in the absence of democratic controls. Surveying the
wreckage of the Great Depression, Roosevelt simply told his followers
that �the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the
Minute Man,� because �[a] small group had concentrated into their own
hands an almost complete control over other people�s property, other
people�s money, other people�s labor�other people�s lives.�

Roosevelt�s analysis of �economic tyranny� shared a critical assumption
with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and other important founders of
our country: that limited government is not an end itself, but the
instrument of a particular vision of society, an egalitarian vision. It
was a social vision in which extremes of wealth and poverty did not
exist, and a relatively equal distribution of productive property
secured independence and freedom for the whole citizenry.

The people who now claim the mantle of Jefferson reject this vision.
Although some pay it lip service by labeling their entitlement
privatization schemes and a few small subsidies for middle-class savings
the birth of an �ownership society,� even a casual familiarity with the
skewed distribution of wealth and power in America reveals the painful
truth behind such nice-sounding phrases. Nevertheless, in allowing the
right to exploit the apparent contradiction between received notions of
limited government and public policies designed to promote a more equal
society, progressives, too, seem to have forgotten what limited
government was really about in early America.

The new laissez-faire of the Reagan-Bush era was not a revival of the
founders� vision of limited government; nor did the New Deal liberalism
so despised today tear up the roots of our country in expanding the role
of government, as conservatives argue. To the contrary, the kind of
society the founders envisioned had no hope of survival without such
innovations in government.

The Real Republican Vision

The New Right�s �Jeffersonian philosophy� of limited government ignores
the most basic historical element of laissez-faire thinking in early
America: the direct, radical purpose of disabling the political power of
the aristocracy. As historian James L. Huston writes, it was against the
�political economy of aristocracy,� government organized by and for a
small, wealthy elite, that supporters of the American revolution
embraced the �egalitarian promise of the negative state.� The ideal,
simply, was a system that restricted the legal and political power of
the wealthy, in order to prevent them from combining against independent
smallholders and those without property. Limited government, in other
words, was a �populist� ideal, a doctrine of the many versus the few. As
a group of North Carolina democrats petitioned in 1776, when �fixing the
fundamental principles of Government,� the goal should be to �oppose
everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich
and chief men exercised to the oppression of the poor.�

Beneath this fear of oppression, popular demand for limited government
was shaped by two basic assumptions: first, that building a genuine
republic depended on a broad, equitable distribution of productive
property and second, that inequitable distributions of property were
caused primarily by government actions that favored the rich�thus the
need for limited government. There were other aspects of liberty, of
course, but preserving a rough equality of productive resources was the
chief measuring stick of good (and bad) government in early America.

Noah Webster expressed this view in his 1787 tract �An Examination into
the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution.� As he wrote, �A
general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole
basis of national freedom . . . the very soul of a republic.� When this
equality holds, �the people will inevitably possess both power and
freedom.� When it is lost, �power departs, liberty expires, and a
commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form.� The same
understanding was shared by spokesmen for the numerous agrarian
�regulation� movements of the revolutionary era, a force that
contributed to Thomas Jefferson�s political ascendancy in the 1790s. As
one regulator theorist argued in the Cumberland Gazette of Falmouth,
Maine, in 1786: �Equality of property is the life of a Republican
government; destroy that equality and the principles of the government
will be wholly corrupted, while the form remains a cloak for oppression
and tyranny.�

In the revolutionary fervor of 1776, John Adams had agreed. �The only
possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of
equal Liberty and public Virtue,� he wrote in a letter to James
Sullivan, �is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of
Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that
the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.� Such thinking
obviously shaped Jefferson�s Draft Constitution for Virginia (1776),
which stipulated that every man without property (or without adequate
property) is entitled to fifty acres of public land upon reaching
adulthood and, even more striking, that no one else should be permitted
to appropriate public land. �Legislators cannot invent too many devices
for subdividing property,� he later wrote in a letter to James Madison.

CLEARLY, JEFFERSON, Adams, and Webster were not only concerned with
abstract principles of freedom, but with the material conditions of
freedom or with the material �extent� of freedom. The yardstick for
measuring liberty was the distribution of productive ownership, not
simply the degree of protection given to property regardless of the
distribution of ownership. Interestingly, the very namesake of the Cato
Institute, �Cato�s Letters� (a series of essays published by John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in British newspapers between 1720 and 1723)
had already formulated the basic argument fifty years earlier. As
�Cato�s Letter #3" (by Gordon) declared in 1720:

A free people are kept so, by no other means than an equal distribution
of property; every man, who has a share of property, having a
proportionable share of power; and the first seeds of anarchy (which,
for the most part, ends in tyranny) are produced from hence, that some
are ungovernably rich, and many more are miserably poor; that is, some
are masters of all means of oppression, and others want all the means of
self-defence.

The chief movers behind the U.S. Constitution (particularly Alexander
Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris) were not concerned with balancing
democracy and property rights, as Madison tried to do in his
masterpiece, The Federalist No. 10. What they wanted was a strong
central government with the power to overturn redistributive schemes
that might originate in the states (as had already occurred with some
frequency in the form of debt and tax relief). At the same time, central
government must be sufficiently divided to prevent national suffrage
from accomplishing similar things.

Warning against economic tyranny�government operating as the �tool and
tyrant� of financial wealth�Madison moved rapidly into republican
opposition by the end of George Washington�s first term. Such fears were
particularly incited by Alexander Hamilton�s debt-funding plan, which
financed huge windfalls for wealthy bondholders in part through an
excise tax on whiskey and other essential commodities. This led to the
Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the first real test of the new federal
government�s monopoly on legitimate violence and a turning point in the
republican movement that would elevate Jefferson to the presidency (and
Madison to secretary of state) in 1801. John Taylor of Caroline, the
leading philosopher of this movement and �keeper of the Jeffersonian
conscience� (as Arthur Schlesinger put it), formulated a strong
democratic theory of wealth that was renewed again and again in
Democratic and third-party politics across the nineteenth century, from
the Jacksonian era through the rise of Populism. �Wealth, like
suffrage,� Taylor wrote in his Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of
the Government of the United States, �must be considerably distributed,
to sustain a democratick republic; and hence, whatever draws a
considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As
power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power.�

Madison himself had outlined the government�s distributive purpose in
1792, asserting in the National Gazette that the �great object� of
securing the republic means �withholding unnecessary opportunities from
a few to increase the inequality of property� and requires �the silent
operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property,
reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme
indigence towards a state of comfort.� Clearly, for Jefferson and
Madison (as for Taylor), the republican social objective of securing a
relatively equal distribution of productive property was paramount in
their thinking about what government should or should not do.

Early American laissez-faire�egalitarian laissez-faire�remained a vital
worldview well into the nineteenth century. In 1838, Samuel Tilden, then
a twenty-four-year-old law student, addressed a meeting of the Farmers,
Mechanics, and Workingmen of New York and noted the �incessant struggles
of the few to establish dominion over the many,� arguing that a new
�spirit of aristocracy� had emerged, �[b]anding together the rich by the
strong ligament of mutual interest; arraying them in an organized class
which acts in phalanx and operates through all the ramifications in
society.� This kind of analysis thrived in Democratic politics and in
workingmens� parties. It also survived in smallholder anti-rent
movements, which fought to invalidate �Law and Order in defense of Human
Rights,� or in Horace Greeley�s words, �the laws which give some men a
thousand times as much lands as they can use and thus deprive millions
of any at all . . . being contrary to the fundamental principles of our
Government.�

The Republican Vision Transformed

Set against this historical backdrop, the last three decades of
resurgent laissez-faire can only be described as a betrayal of
Jeffersonian ideals: the New Right�s attack on government has been
accompanied, not by growing economic equality, but by record levels of
inequality. In fact, wealth is more concentrated today than it was at
the time of independence. Those in the richest 1 percent today hold
about three times the share held by their counterparts in the late
eighteenth century.

Such a pattern of concentrated wealth was visible already by the 1820s.
By 1860, the richest 1 percent held 29 percent of the wealth, and by
1912 they held 56 percent. After bottoming out in the late 1970s, at 22
percent, today the richest Americans hold nearly 40 percent of the wealth.

Beneath this pattern of growing inequality lie the roots of a political
transformation in egalitarian thought from laissez-faire principles to
progressive legislative reform. Put simply, changes in the American
economy rendered limited government obsolete, in terms of both practical
needs and egalitarian goals. To the laissez-faire classes of old, �the
farmers, mechanics, and workingmen� Andrew Jackson frequently extolled,
it was self-evident that limited government was no longer enough to
prevent a resurgent aristocracy in America. At the same time, their
rethinking of how to achieve egalitarian goals gave rise to new
appropriations of laissez-faire thought by the opponents of such goals.

One important catalyst for these changes was the rise of regional and
national transportation systems, which helped to integrate domestic
markets, spurring competitive, large-scale enterprise to meet the
growing demand. Against these commercial forces and their growing scale,
the Jeffersonian classes had little natural protection in the
marketplace. In particular, the oppressive role of �judge-made� common
law, governing employer contracts and property disputes, among other
aspects of the economy, was a key pressure point in the popular retreat
from laissez-faire.

BY SHIELDING employers from the demands and needs of a growing
wage-earning class�which by 1850 comprised at least half the working-age
population and probably three-quarters in New England�the common law (or
more precisely, American judges� interpretations of this largely British
legal inheritance) created a wage system that was �riddled with
important and lasting asymmetries of power,� as the legal historian
Christopher Tomlins writes. Employers could change wage-and-hour terms
basically at will, and they had absolute rights of discharge to
reinforce this control over terms. The common law also shielded
employers from liability for workplace fatalities and injuries, and
criminalized worker organizing in a famous series of �labor conspiracy�
cases. �A code of laws draws around [the mechanic] a magick circle, by
making mechanical combinations punishable, lest they should check
capitalist combinations; and he is reimbursed by penalties for the loss
of hope,� John Taylor wrote in his influential treatise Tyranny Unmasked
(1822). Under these conditions, the growth of markets and the
concentration of economic power went hand in hand.

The natural equality of men, people realized, could only be preserved if
the state intervened to rectify legally constructed imbalances of
economic power. Already by the 1830s, as property requirements for
voting were gradually abolished in most states, popular pressure for
anticharter laws, labor laws, and land policies favorable to free-hold
settlement augured the downfall of egalitarian laissez-faire and the
rise of a new egalitarian vision of active government. But this was
hardly a rejection of the nation�s founding principles. The Jacksonian
reformer Orestes Brownson called it �social democracy,� writing in the
Boston Quarterly Review in 1841 that a social democrat is in fact a
�Jeffersonian Democrat,� because he seeks to direct the workings of
government against economic dominion, so the �actual condition of men in
society shall be in harmony with their acknowledged rights as citizens.�

In the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century, the
laissez-faire advocates of old turned against limited government as an
egalitarian strategy, and instead sought political power, collective
bargaining, and social protections. The new political approach, as FDR
would later explain so powerfully, retained the egalitarian vision of
laissez-faire while necessarily rejecting its applicability to
contemporary realities, where the threat of a new aristocracy had
already long been realized. Limited government was no Jeffersonian
answer to the robber barons or the modern corporation.

However, as central government absorbed and adjusted to these democratic
pressures, laissez-faire theory was revived in a mutant form that
divorced it from egalitarian goals. Essentially, the whole idea was
turned on its head, becoming a doctrine of elite self-defense. In this
version, the moral idea of a natural tendency toward equality, held by
antigovernment theorists in early America, was replaced by positivistic
concepts of natural inequality linked to economic laws.

Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner was the great theorist of elite
laissez-faire. A devout Social Darwinist, Sumner argued that the very
idea of equality was nothing more than superstitious �dogma� (a term he
applied, it seems, to anything that placed limits on the survival of the
fittest). Sumner conceded a property-owning ideal for all citizens, but
he argued that the only thing government should do to facilitate such
ownership is secure personal liberty and private property�failing to
confront, of course, the existing inequality of assets and bargaining
power that such a policy would only make worse. Thus conceived, opposing
government became the stock and trade of those seeking to prevent
precisely what laissez-faire was originally meant to secure�a diffusion
of economic power befitting a genuine republic. The elites literally
recreated laissez-faire, turning an anti-aristocratic sword into a
shield for concentrated wealth.

As legislatures began to inject new public standards into the private
economy, elite laissez-faire found its last redoubt in an activist
Supreme Court. Lochner v. New York (1905), casting down a state law
limiting bakery workers� hours as an infringement of �liberty of
contract� under the Fourteenth Amendment, was the flagship of this new
�laissez-faire constitutionalism,� which stymied social reforms for
three decades thereafter.

In challenging the new laissez-faire, progressives such as Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson understood what their conservative
opponents did not: that the true Jeffersonian measure of good government
was not abstract principle�simply �the government is best which governs
least��but rather the social good secured by a particular government. If
the �laws of this country, do not prevent the strong from crushing the
weak,� as Wilson wrote in The New Freedom, no one could doubt that
government had failed, whatever its structure or reach. In Franklin
Roosevelt�s victories of 1932 and 1936, this perspective was reborn and
consolidated with a new electoral mandate, as the whole ideological
edifice of elite laissez-faire was swept away by a massive popular tide
in favor of the welfare state.

The major achievements of the New Deal and the broader legislative era
it spawned�collective bargaining rights and federal wage and hour
standards for most workers; old age, disability, and unemployment
insurance; cash assistance for the poor; the GI Bill; home mortgage
assistance; a fixed progressive tax structure; and, later, the launching
of federal health-care programs�undergirded an industrial version of
precisely the kind of middle-class society that Madison and Jefferson
desired and even Federalists such as John Adams and Noah Webster
believed was essential to the preservation of liberty. If Jefferson�s
ideal system of universal small-scale ownership faded in the New Deal,
the Jeffersonian dream of shared prosperity was never so close to being
realized as then. Middle incomes grew much faster than those at the top,
the poverty rate was cut in half, and strong cultural norms instilled by
higher education and the churches curtailed the power of business. The
strong growth of this period was something close to the all-rising tide
of economic theory, and this, furthermore, created favorable political
conditions for dismantling racial segregation in the South.

Revolt of the Elites: Part Two

Despite or because of this success, a small network of businessmen,
political activists, and academics, along with a handful of wealthy
patrons, began organizing a counter-movement in the 1950s, building what
was essentially a new political party out of the dregs of racism and the
resentment of private-sector elites faced with diminishing status and
power and more social costs. Many commentators focus on the right�s
institution-building after Barry Goldwater�s run for the White House in
1964, emphasizing the role of business donors and business foundations
(Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Coors, and so on) in financing new think tanks
and coordinated �ideas work� in a period of intensive economic
uncertainty. However, this social and ideological revolt was fully
formed long before the economic crises of the 1970s opened the
floodgates of corporate money that transformed it from a radical
movement into a powerful political machine. Reagan won in a landslide on
the same basic antigovernment message offered by Goldwater sixteen years
earlier; by the American Liberty League thirty years before that; and by
the Gilded Age theorists who first reconstructed laissez-faire more than
a century ago.

The new laissez-faire detached limited government from egalitarian goals
and actively dismantled relative equality through tax changes, spending
cuts, and regulatory retreat on labor and civil rights. As the economist
Robert Solow described it, the New Right platform amounted to little
more than elite plunder��the redistribution of wealth in favor of the
wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.� It succeeded: nearly all
of the wealth America created over the last twenty-five years was
captured by the top 20 percent of households, who now pay only a penny
more on the dollar in total taxes than the poorest 20 percent. Changes
in corporate pay scales reflect the broader pattern of upward
redistribution: average wages lagged behind productivity gains even as
executive compensation outpaced earnings growth. Most striking of all,
particularly from a Jeffersonian perspective (and given our continuing
image as a highly entrepreneurial country), is the extraordinary
concentration of active business assets in the United States. By the end
of the 1980s, only 8.6 percent of households had any significant active
business assets. Yet those few who did held about 40 percent of total
household wealth. In early America, the equivalent scenario would have
been a near-total absence of small family farms�something unthinkable
even to the greatest landlords of the time.

Laissez-Faire for Whom?

What would the original theorists of American laissez-faire think of its
current deployment? A middling farmer named William Manning, who gave
popular voice to the Jeffersonian movement in his �Key of Liberty� of
1799, declared that the destruction of freedom �always arises from the
unreasonable dispositions and combinations of the Few.� Perhaps Manning
would agree with leveraged buyout king Theodore Forstmann (a member of
the Cato Institute�s elite donor group) that in a republic �the only
role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity
of market transactions.� The difference is that neither Manning,
Jefferson, nor Madison would view the United States today as a republic,
with 10 percent of the people possessing more than 70 percent of the
country�s net worth and a substantial majority having little or no real
wealth and very little economic independence. No argument for limited
government can invoke republican principles while ignoring vast
disparities in wealth or how inequality is growing as government
retreats. Certainly no stated mission of government retreat can call
itself Jeffersonian if the net result is more power and wealth at the top.

Furthermore, leading policies of the free-market right directly violate
the founders� expressed policy principles. The �flat tax� promoted by
Cato and other libertarian groups is perhaps the most blatant of these.
As Jefferson himself wrote, in a letter to Madison, �[a]nother means of
silently lessening the inequality of property . . . is to tax the higher
portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.� In
contrast, the Hall-Rabushka-type flat tax Cato pushes (developed by two
Hoover Institution economists in the 1980s) would tax all labor earnings
(including fringe benefits) and corporate profits at a single low rate,
while entirely excluding capital gains and wealth from taxation. This
will be a �tremendous boon to the economic elite,� Hall and Rabushka
state in their book The Flat Tax, first published in 1983. Needless to
say, such a policy is radically at odds with the principles of taxation
held by Jefferson, who, in his Second Inaugural Address, declared it
�the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what
mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer of the United States?�

Indeed, as a proponent of public works and social investment, Jefferson
openly celebrated the collective benefits of taxing the rich. In an 1811
letter to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, he wrote, �Our revenues once
liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied
to canals, roads, schools, &c., and the farmer will see his government
supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a
paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being
called on to spend a cent from his earnings.� Today such a view is
called �class warfare.� Jefferson called it democracy.

The intellectual folly of today�s elite laissez-faire is captured
perfectly in the Cato Institute�s 2006 annual report, which celebrates
its thirtieth anniversary and eulogizes Milton Friedman (who died late
that year). The introduction concludes by quoting from Thomas
Jefferson�s First Inaugural Address on the definition of �good
government.� A good government, Jefferson declared, is one �which shall
restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise
free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and
shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.� For
Cato, this is cited as a generic creed against taxes and regulation. But
for Jefferson and the republican movement in early America, taking from
the mouth of labor the bread it has earned was a slogan of egalitarian
populism and referred specifically to the Federalists� debt-funding
plan, which was designed, many believed, to create a new financial
aristocracy out of revenues paid by the people. The Jeffersonian defense
of labor�s bread condemned upward redistribution, not downward
redistribution. Certainly, it was not the blanket condemnation of taxes
and regulation Cato would have us believe.

If the welfare state means progressive taxation, social spending to
strengthen the middle class and elevate the poor, and the regulation of
corporate power, it does not offend Jeffersonian principles. What
offends Jeffersonian principles is a government that �fortifies the
conspiracies� of the rich and powerful (as Philadelphia republican
George Logan put it in 1792), leaving ordinary people without protection
from their strategies and combinations and their public disregard. By
that standard, we have reached a new low point of Jeffersonian liberty.
In Jefferson�s name, the government has promoted inequality, not
restrained it. It has punished poor communities, weakened the middle
class, and created a new ruling class that makes our old Loyalist
enemies seem moderate and unjustly maligned. The people responsible for
this certainly do have a philosophy of limited government. But their
limited government is the Gilded Age version, a doctrine of elite
self-defense. It is not the early American version, where the beginning
of freedom is equality of productive resources, and limiting government
is necessary to prevent that equality from being destroyed by wealthy
elites.

Lew Daly is a senior fellow at Demos in New York City. He is the author
of God and the Welfare State (Boston Review Books/MIT Press, 2006).
Unjust Deserts, coauthored with Gar Alperovitz, is forthcoming in Fall
2008 from the New Press.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"