he was a lefty, just as jefferson was. you are sitting in your own
excrement again:)))))
http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers
Estate tax and the founding fathers
You can't take it with you
Oct 14th 2010, 21:44 by Lexington
MY FRIEND the Liberal Curmudgeon strikes again:
If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and
those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most
definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and
inherited wealth.
With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the
Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government
abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to
perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited
Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the
source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely
echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is
manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every
generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from
posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said:
"There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we
conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
The
states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving
expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that
equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of
wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that
by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old
system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of
particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue
influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice."
Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend
to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and
principle of a genuine republic."
Others wanted to go much further;
Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that
landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each
generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent"
— in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed
at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all
citizens at age 21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or
her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed
property."
Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party,
the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often
emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a
democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for the "idle rich"
and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore
Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated
tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of
large wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of
great and genuine detriment to the community at large.''
In her
debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate
Christine O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of
Marxism." I'm not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want
to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas
Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before
her next debate.
adam smith socialist:The rate of profit is naturally low in rich and
high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries
which are going fastest to ruin:No society can surely be flourishing
and happy when part of the members are poor and miserable
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Quotes-economics.htm
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age
of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy when part of the
members are poor and miserable."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad
effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the
sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing
concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with
regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain
only of those of other people."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and
diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property,
the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never
sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"The liberal reward of labor, therefore, as it is the necessary
effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth.
The scanty maintenance of the laboring poor, on the other hand, is the
natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving
condition that they going backwards fast."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor
countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of
the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their
respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they
respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ....[As Henry
Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to]
'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the
poor and burdening the rich.'"
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between
masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters.
When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is
always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor
of the masters."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"The interest of dealers, however,... is a always in some respects
different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... The
proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes frm this
order ought... never to be adopted till after having been long and
carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the
most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose
interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have
generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and
who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed
it."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"In a society of an hundred thousand families, there will perhaps be
one hundred who don't labour at all, and who yet, either by violence,
or by the more orderly oppression of law, employ a greater part of the
labour of society than any other ten thousand in it. The division of
what remains, too, after this enormous defalcation, is by no means
made in proportion to the labour of each individual. On the contrary
those who labour most get least. The opulent merchant, who spends a
great part of his time in luxury and entertainments, enjoys a much
greater proportion of the profits of his traffic, than all the Clerks
and Accountants who do the business. These last, again, enjoying a
great deal of leisure, and suffering scarce any other hardship besides
the confinement of attendance, enjoy a much greater share of the
produce, than three times an equal number of artizans, who, under
their direction, labour much more severely and assiduously. The
artizan again, tho' he works generally under cover, protected from the
injuries of the weather, at his ease and assisted by the convenience
of innumerable machines, enjoys a much greater share than the poor
labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and, who
while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the
other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his
shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be
buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building."
-- Adam Smith, first draft of Wealth Of Nations
[And here is what Adam Smith thought about labor unions:]
"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is,
unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of
those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that
masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.
Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and
uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their
actual price."
-- Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations
"....Adam Smith—one of the founders of modern economics—recognized
clearly that a poor distribution of wealth could undermine the free
market system, noting that: “The disposition to admire, and almost to
worship, the rich and the powerful and…neglect persons of poor and
mean condition…is the great and most universal cause of the corruption
of our moral sentiments.”