Originally published on Forbes.com Jan 14th, 2014
If you want some deep insight into the issues that divide us today including those about taxation, you need to pick up Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left. When I’m reading something on my Kindle, I like to share choice passages. I really had to restrain myself with this one, but even with that, you can probably find about 10% of the text of the book in my twitter feed. I’m not going to give you a book review, because so much has been written about those two, that I have no idea where this work fits in. I will say that it is very accessible and easy to read with nice bite-size chunks of flowery 18th Century language scattered here and there like Burke’s observation on the passing of chivalry.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
Burke And Paine
Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine were rough contemporaries. Burke lived 1729-1797 and Paine 1737-1809. Burke had a long career in the British House of Commons. It is harder to characterize Paine’s career. He bounced around a bit, but he is best known as what we might call an activist. Burke and Paine reached similar conclusions about the issues surrounding the American Revolution. They thought is was wrong for Parliament to impose new types of taxes on the Americans. Paine wrote a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis which included the famous words
These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Paine began the series while he was with George Washington’s army retreating from Fort Lee, NJ in November of 1776 after a string of defeats which would leave New York City in British hands for the rest of the war. Paine’s inspiring words were read to the troops on December 23. Three days later they won a significant victory in the Battle of Trenton.
The literary war that Paine and Burke would commence nearly two decades later is prefigured in the different reasons that they sympathized with the beleaguered Americans. Paine thought it was about fundamental rights to self-government. Burke thought that, although Parliament had the right to tax the colonies any way it wanted to, it was a really bad idea to aggravate the Americans with innovative new taxes. Prudence would dictate that Parliament consider the freedom that the colonists had enjoyed and not aggravate people for the sake of a theoretical principle.
We Do Not Really Have A Right-Wing In America
By 18th Century standards, Burke was a liberal. He spent much of his time defending the House of Commons from encroachments by the monarchy and aristocracy. He defended the rights of Catholics in Ireland and campaigned against exploitation of the people of India by the East India Company and against the slave trade.
He believed that the unwritten British Constitution based on a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was as good as it could get for the British people and that they should mainly be grateful for the liberty that it provided them. He believed that pure democracy was a great menace to liberty, something that our Founders also believed.
It was the French Revolution that highlighted his differences with Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine like other Enlightenment radicals believed that society could be reconstituted from first principles based on pure reasoning. His theory was based on the idea that the first people were solitary individuals who consented to join together for their mutual advantage and monarchy and aristocracy were exploitation.
Modern conservatives of the libertarian bent can draw much of their inspiration from Paine. Peter Schiff in this recent The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy in explaining how money got started writes
At first, it was every man for himself. You ate or wore what you could pick or catch. Barter was the first advance. If you had some extra meat, and your neighbor had an extra fur, you might make a direct exchange.
Paine’s radicalism calls for every subsequent generation to freely consent to all the structures and institutions that have come from the past. Yuval Levin is critical of this view.
Only by beginning one’s theory of politics from a highly implausible thought experiment about perfectly independent people founding a society by choice can one imagine a society in which choice is utterly central. When one looks at how human beings actually live, it is impossible to ignore the centrality and the value of compulsory obligations.
The Surprise When It Comes To The Welfare State
Both Paine and Burke advocated for minimal government intrusion in the economy. They both recognized that capitalism is hard on the poor. Burke believes that it is the duty of the rich to ameliorate poverty, but, of course, he does not think that inequality is a bad thing at all. Rather he thinks all should be encouraged
to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind.
It is a very different viewpoint than the winner take all version of meritocracy that sees those who fall behind as slacking losers.
Paine for all his individualism sees a direct government role in dealing with poverty.
Government exists to address violations of rights to freedom and choice, and it must occasionally do so by a modest redistribution of material resources to keep the poorest from falling beneath even the minimal standard of human dignity. Paine is thus an ardent capitalist but one alert to some of the effects of capitalism on the poor.
Some level of redistribution is based on his Paine’s view of origins. In the beginning all the world’s resources were there for whoever could take them. People have a right to improvements they make to the land, but, in a sense, the land belongs to all.
Since the first human generation had a right to all the earth, and since subsequent ones have denied that right to most, it is only proper that compensation should be paid, drawn from a tax on property and made available to all.
This view echoes down the generations with Henry George’s single tax which the Green Party incorporated into its platform as Land Value Taxation. We also see it in a program such as the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. Paine believed that the best time to tax property was on inheritance, which emphasizes the independence that each generation has from the next in his view.
The Present
Our own political spectrum from far-right to far-left is something of a tangled skein of Burke’s communitarian conservatism and Paine’s largely, but not entirely libertarian, generational clean slate. Yuval Levin observes:
American conservatives are conserving a political tradition begun in a revolution (even if it was not as radical a revolution as Paine insists), has long made the American right more inclined both to resort to theory and to appeal to individualism than Burke was.
When contemporary “liberals” defend long established entitlement programs against “conservative” onslaught, they could as well call on the shade of Burke, who might have not approved of the innovation, but might argue against uprooting them when once established.
As Levin puts the Burke/Paine dichotomy:
In confronting the society around us, are we first grateful for what works well about it and moved to reinforce and build on that, or are we first outraged by what works poorly and moved to uproot and transform it?
I can’t recommend Levin’s book highly enough, although, I have to say that you might want to read Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France first. It is well worth the time.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Afternote
It is amazing the way Burke and Paine will come popping up. As I was finishing the book, I caught an episode of Pawn Stars where someone came in with a rebound copy of the Annual Register for 1775, which was edited by Burke. Rick explained to the kid who was selling a family heirloom how Edmund Burke was supportive of the American Revolution. Well, it is the History Channel after all. Meanwhile, we have Governor Christie’s Bridgegate, which concerns a massive politically motivated traffic jam in Fort Lee, where Paine started working on American Crisis. Fort Lee is working on having a monument to Thomas Paine erected. Maybe the Governor could get behind that as a way of making amends.
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