"The poor are lazy and deserve to be poor."

[white_wolf]

You know who says otherwise? Thomas Jefferson. Someone on another forum linked me this letter he wrote to Madison about property rights. I'm going to link the whole thing so you all can read it in it's context, but here are a few quotes. The letter is very short less than a page and rather interesting considering the Teabaggers thing Jefferson is one of them.

"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation." Is he talking about a progressive income tax or at least some form of property tax.

Here is the full letter,though the last paragraph is just Jefferson talking about fruit so it's not that interesting at that point,: http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefLett.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=41&division=div1

[PassingFair]

1. I believe that Jefferson was a time-traveling alien.

How else can you explain such genius?

[surrealAmerican]

13. Or perhaps, despite changes in technology, ...

... people have not changed very much in the last 250 years.

[EOTE]

2. He was a wise man.

And all the tea-bagging nuts who claim to idolize and emulate the founding fathers couldn't be further away from their ideologies.

[Patiod]

3. And yet I know people who believe this

Their parents were middle class, and sent them to good public or private schools, and then ensured that they could get through college (loans or outright tuition payment). They have always had good nutrition (not fast food) and good dental care, and they were raised speaking "middle class" American English.

And yet they claim "I didn't have any advantages" and wonder why others just can't "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".

Our book club had a few of these folks, and reading "Nickled and Dimed to Death in America" and "A Hope in the Unseen" helped begin to open their eyes.

[The Magistrate]

4. Easily Testable, Sir

Shall we, say, round up a passel of banksters and hedge-fund fraudsters and set them to picking beans from dawn to dusk, just as an experiment, to see how long before they start falling down and need serious prodding to keep at it...?

[Warpy]

5. I like your idea

I've often dreamed of dressing them out of a thrift shop and putting them into a typical ghetto apartment and assigning them from one to three part time minimum wage jobs (number worked at their discretion), just to see how they'd manage for six months.

I think they'd all steal cell phones and be wailing to their cronies for rescue within a couple of days.

[KT2000]

6. Great find!

Now, how can we get this posted on a Tea site.

[white_wolf]

7. I'm tempted to go to Free Republic

and start a post about Beck's Common Sense acting like I'm a fan and then innocently ask people if they've read any of his other works. If they say yes I'm going to ask how they felt about the part of Age of Reason where he calls churches inventions designed to enslave mankind or Agrarian Justice when he rails against absolute property rights and talks about establishing a type of social security fund.

[KT2000]

10. Good idea but

wear a high quality gas mask and Level 3 moon suit just in case.

[hifiguy]

8. If the baggers ever had someone read Jefferson to them

and explain what he meant, v e r y slowly, their heads would implode after what little brains they have leaked out their ears. The Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom would drop them stone cold dead, as would his rewriting of the bible.

[Kingofalldems]

9. Jefferson was a Communist

[Broderick]

12. Jefferson wanted to be French

I learned that in the history channel special about John Adams.

[Warpy]

14. Jefferson was a closet Muslim

He had a Quran, you know.

[begin_within]

11. No, the rich are lazy and deserve to be poor.

[Igel]

15. It's a progressive property tax.

Of course, he's talking about French, in which the land in the countryside was mostly tied up in large estates, much of which was not worked. It provided no good income to anybody.

You distort his words to make them say other than he probably intended unless you complete his thought: "If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment, but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state."

His philosophizing would entail taxing the French rich's property so that it could be made available--by grant or by lease or by squatting--to the urban poor. Who, naturally, would want to return to nature and work the land.

He, of course, was all for an "ownership" society. Then again, it would require that the unemployed or poor uproot themselves and move: The right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed. This is good, because the unemployed want to engage in virtuous labor and because the earth forms a common stock for man to labor and live on. Every man should have his own fig tree.

So let's apply it to the US. His point was that excessive lands were "uncultivated." Most of the largest landholdings are uncultivated or at least worked (I have in mind some huge Texas ranches).

But there are truly huge amounts of land held idle, to which property laws say that the unemployed are forbidden to live there or work there and, at best, are "undisturbed only for the sake of game." This is, of course, an affront to natural law, that so many should be poor and so much unworked land be withheld from them.

Of course, the last paragraph applies primarily to things like BLM land, vast landholdings which the poor might work but which are held in reserve often "for the sake of game."

That's the thing about Jefferson, and free-thinkers who try to argue practice from principle. In adducing some practice suggested by him that you think can be directly applied to your advantage, or at least to another's disadvantage, he often says something that you find to be profoundly disagreeable. But to use what you want requires assenting to that which you reject. T'is a conundrum. However, the early history of the US--and, indeed, of the colonies before the Revolution, and one small cause of support for it--was the restricting by King George of settlement beyond a certain western frontier. When it was land claimed by the states and therefore brought into the union, little land was withheld from the citizens. After there were lands purchased by the federal government, making the federal government the landowner, the land was more often withheld. By being held "in common" to the group, it was therefore withheld from the individual--which is rather the opposite of Jefferson's view here.