Just as we can look back in American history to find analogies to our current problems, we can look back in American history to find analogies to our potential solutions. The man who offered perhaps the most comprehensive vision of an alternative at the time of Jefferson was Thomas Paine. One would think that they were quite similar; they both were famous for their pro-democracy stances and utopian rhetorical styles. But they had very different backgrounds, and those backgrounds led to different outlooks.

Thomas Paine

While Jefferson had always lived amongst the upper classes in Virginia, Paine was a bit more worldly. He spent a good deal of time in cities and areas in Europe that had never had the opportunity to develop the Jeffersonian ideal, getting swept up in the Industrial Revolution instead. As a result, he was more prepared to deal with the realities of what happens when industrialization happens before equal landownership.

After experiencing both the American and French revolutions, many of Paine’s economic ideas were put forth in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice. The main goal of the pamphlet was to introduce an inheritance tax and use that to fund an old-age pension and a one-time payment to every individual upon reaching the age of 21.

However, the philosophy behind the pamphlet opens up room for a wider array of solutions than what he explicitly wrote. He identified poverty as being created by civilization, and believed that it was therefore civilization’s job to solve it. And the reason that poverty was so prevalent despite the increased wealth that came from civilization? He had two answers. The first, people were being separated from their right to natural property:

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. … Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

The second, which is mentioned near the end, and not frequently talked about when people discuss Paine, is theft of labor:

This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.

The reason he doesn’t include a solution for this injustice in his plan is because he believes it is “impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces”. So instead, he simply hopes that the one-time payment and old-age pension will be enough to alleviate the effects of this problem.

Since then, there have been plenty of people that have taken these ideas and expanded on them. Henry George took the idea of ground-rent payments and developed the idea of a land value tax, where people would pay the amount their land is worth to rent every month, eliminating speculation and allowing everyone to benefit from wealth that no one person created. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers took the idea of an old-age pension and developed Social Security. And countless labor leaders and left-wingers have taken the idea of stolen labor and developed methods to increase the amount of their own labor that workers get to keep, from strong unions and labor laws all the way to worker ownership.

At the end of the day, these are the kinds of solutions that are going to fix America. We could try to implement a new set of policies that let us pretend that we all live our lives completely independently, but that is bound to fail. The frontier is closed for good, and we need to figure out what equality and democracy look like without it.