Thomas Paine

I was about to make a tart comment regarding Edmund Burke when naturally I looked upon Thomas Paine, whom I could not stop reading.

Radical, deist, revolutionary, globalist, he is intent on cutting through pernicious, self-interested garbage and extending the actual principles of actual liberty for the actual benefit of actual humanity. He rightly roasts Burke over aristocracy, privilege, and monarchism. His only real mistake, it seems to me, was underestimating the seduction of power in the French Revolution, which nearly cost him his life.

When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms. Give to any man a million a year, and add thereto the power of creating and disposing of places, at the expense of a country, and the liberties of that country are no longer secure. What is called the splendour of a throne is no other than the corruption of the state. It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of the public taxes.

When once such a vicious system is established it becomes the guard and protection of all inferior abuses. The man who is in the receipt of a million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in the event, it should reach to himself. It is always his interest to defend inferior abuses, as so many outworks to protect the citadel; and on this species of political fortification, all the parts have such a common dependence that it is never to be expected they will attack each other. [NOTE]

Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world, had it not been for the abuses it protects. It is the master-fraud, which shelters all others. By admitting a participation of the spoil, it makes itself friends; and when it ceases to do this it will cease to be the idol of courtiers.

As the principle on which constitutions are now formed rejects all hereditary pretensions to government, it also rejects all that catalogue of assumptions known by the name of prerogatives.

If there is any government where prerogatives might with apparent safety be entrusted to any individual, it is in the federal government of America. The president of the United States of America is elected only for four years. He is not only responsible in the general sense of the word, but a particular mode is laid down in the constitution for trying him.

Like Twain, his impatience only grew with his understanding. His Deist attack on religion in the Age of Reason, only mildly more radical than many of his contemporaries, sank his reputation.

I am left with an impression of great political and social sophistication; the only dust around this work is on the calculations in pounds sterling. It is often shocking to read the Founding Fathers, and the ringing intelligence of their debates rekindles my contempt for our present clownocracy.