What Would Jefferson Do?: How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down

...Although some pay it lip service by labeling their entitlement privatization schemes and a few small subsidies for middle-class savings the birth of an "ownership society," even a casual familiarity with the skewed distribution of wealth and power in America reveals the painful truth behind such nice-sounding phrases...

...The strong growth of this period was something close to the all-rising tide of economic theory, and this, furthermore, created favorable political conditions for dismantling racial segregation in the South...

...In his Independence Day oration at the Jefferson Memorial in 1987, Reagan called for a new "economic bill of rights" to liberate the people by privatizing government services and by reducing taxes, regulation, and social spending...

...For example, Michael Tomasky's much-discussed American Prospect essay "Party In Search of a Notion" (April 2006) advises a return to the notion of the "common good...

...Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power," he declared...

...Under these conditions, the growth of markets and the concentration of economic power went hand in hand...

...in total taxes than the poorest 20 percent...

...Against these commercial forces and their growing scale, the Jeffersonian classes had little natural protection in the marketplace...

...A devout Social Darwinist, Sumner argued that the very idea of equality was nothing more than superstitious "dogma" (a term he applied, it seems, to anything that placed limits on the survival of the fittest...

...By 1860, the richest 1 percent held 29 percent of the wealth, and by 1912 they held 56 percent...

...philosophy" of limited government...

...every man, who has a share of property, having a proportionable share of power...

...The rhetorical device was simple...

...Less often noted than his frightening analogies with communism was Reagan's view that the welfare state violated the "freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers...

...This will be a "tremendous boon to the economic elite," Hall and Rabushka state in their book The Flat Tax, first published in 1983...

...As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power...

...Needless to say, such a policy is radically at odds with the principles of taxation held by Jefferson, who, in his Second Inaugural Address, declared it "the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer of the United States...

...Unjust Deserts, coauthored with Gar Alperovitz, is forthcoming in Fall 2009 from the New Press...

...Interestingly, the very namesake of the Cato Institute, "Cato's Letters" (a series of essays published by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in British newspapers between 1720 and 1723) had already formulated the basic argument fifty years earlier...

...A middling farmer named William Manning, who gave popular voice to the Jeffersonian movement in his "Key of Liberty" of 1799, declared that the destruction of freedom "always arises from the unreasonable dispositions and combinations of the Few...

...In 1838, Samuel Tilden, then a twenty-four-year-old law student, addressed a meeting of the Farmers, Mechanics, and Workingmen of New York and noted the "incessant struggles of the few to 62 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 establish dominion over the many," arguing that a new "spirit of aristocracy" had emerged, "[b]anding together the rich by the strong ligament of mutual interest...

...The yardstick for measuring liberty was the distribution of productive ownership, not simply the degree of protection given to property regardless of the distribution of ownership...

...Limited government was no Jeffersonian answer to the robber barons or the modern corporation...

...He also told them to cast their presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, who was ready to tame this new political beast and put a stop to those people who would "trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state...

...66 n DISSENT / Summer 2008...

...cash assistance for the poor...

...After bottoming out in the late 1970s, at 22 percent, today the richest Americans hold nearly 40 percent of the wealth...

...The message was bracing, yet edifying: cutting taxes and reducing public spending and regulation will bring us closer to what the people who founded our country believed in 1776 and in the early nation...

...Changes in corporate pay scales reflect the broader pattern of upward redistribution: average wages lagged behind productivity gains even as executive compensation outpaced earnings growth...

...Furthermore, leading policies of the freemarket right directly violate the founders' expressed policy principles...

...In the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century, the laissez-faire advocates of old turned against limited government as an egalitarian strategy, and instead sought political power, collective bargaining, and social protections...

...To the laissez-faire classes of old, "the farmers, mechanics, and workingmen" Andrew Jackson frequently extolled, it was self-evident that limited government was no longer enough to prevent a resurgent aristocracy in America...

...As "Cato's Letter #3" (by Gordon) declared in 1720: A free people are kept so, by no other means than an equal distribution of property...

...What these modern-day Jeffersonians hated most of all was government redistribution...

...As historian James L. Huston writes, it was against the "political economy of aristocracy," government organized by and for a small, wealthy elite, that supporters of the American revolution embraced the "egalitarian promise of the negative state...

...What would the original theorists of American laissez-faire think of its current deployment...

...and by the Gilded Age theorists who first reconstructed laissez-faire more than a century ago...

...Over waves of euphoric cheering from the 100,000 people gathered to hear him in Philadelphia's Franklin Field, Roosevelt hailed his battle against business domination as a second coming of the American Revolution...

...But this was hardly a rejection of the nation's founding principles...

...Many commentators focus on the right's institution-building after Barry Goldwater's run for the White House in 1964, emphasizing the role of business donors and business foundations (Scaife, Olin, Bradley, Coors, and so on) in financing new think tanks and coordinated "ideas work" in a period of intensive economic uncertainty...

...For the "New Right" movement inspired by Goldwater and Reagan after 1964, attacking the welfare state was a political reenactment of the American founding—a revival, they claimed, of "Jeffersonian democracy...

...and, later, the launching of federal health-care programs—undergirded an industrial version of precisely the kind of middleclass society that Madison and Jefferson desired and even Federalists such as John Adams and Noah Webster believed was essential to the preservation of liberty...

...Essentially, the whole idea was turned on its head, becoming a doctrine of elite self-defense...

...Now known simply as "The Speech," it was a performance that launched the extreme right wing of the country from the political margins into the highest seats of government...

...No argument for limited government can invoke republican principles while ignoring vast disparities in wealth or how inequality is growing as government retreats...

...old age, disability, and unemployment insurance...

...of Government," the goal should be to "oppose everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich and chief men exercised to the oppression of the poor...

...A code of laws draws around [the mechanic] a magick circle, by making mechanical combinations punishable, lest they should check capitalist combinations...

...However, this social and ideological revolt was fully formed long before the economic crises of the 1970s opened the floodgates of corporate money that transformed it from a radical movement into a powerful political machine...

...BY SHIELDING employers from the demands and needs of a growing wageearning class—which by 1850 comprised at least half the working-age population and probably three-quarters in New England— the common law (or more precisely, American judges' interpretations of this largely British legal inheritance) created a wage system that was "riddled with important and lasting asymmetries of power," as the legal historian Christopher Tomlins writes...

...arraying them in an organized class which acts in phalanx and operates through all the ramifications in society...

...a fixed progressive tax structure...

...The "flat tax" promoted by Cato and other libertarian groups is perhaps the most blatant of these...

...When this equality holds, "the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom...

...In challenging the new laissez-faire, progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson understood what their conservative opponents did not: that the true Jeffersonian measure of good government was not abstract principle—simply "the government is best which governs least"—but rather the social good secured by a particular government...

...At the same time, central government must be sufficiently divided to prevent national suffrage from accomplishing similar things...

...When they opposed campaign finance reform, they argued that giving money to politicians is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment: limiting such money is no better than shutting down newspapers or throwing people in jail for calling King George III a tyrant...

...nor did the New Deal liberalism so despised today tear up the roots of our country in expanding the role of government, as conservatives argue...

...Wealth, like suffrage," Taylor wrote in his Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, "must be considerably distributed, to sustain a democratick republic...

...Noah Webster expressed this view in his 1787 tract "An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution...

...laissez-faire was originally meant to secure—a diffusion of economic power befitting a genuine republic...

...Constitution (particularly Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris) were not concerned with balancing democracy and property rights, as Madison tried to do in his masterpiece, The Federalist No...

...A good government, Jefferson declared, is one "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned...

...home mortgage assistance...

...By the end of the 1980s, only 8.6 percent of households had any significant active business assets...

...If the welfare state means progressive taxation, social spending to strengthen the middle class and elevate the poor, and the regulation of corporate power, it does not offend Jeffersonian principles...

...This kind of analysis thrived in Democratic politics and in workingmens' parties...

...and the first seeds of anarchy (which, for the most part, ends in tyranny) are produced from hence, that some are ungovernably rich, and many more are miserably poor...

...The Cato Institute, Washington's leading free-market think tank, is perhaps the most conspicuous new claimant to the founders' vision...

...The argument was philosophically radical in a liberal society: private power, no less than public power, inevitably leads to tyranny and destruction in the absence of democratic controls...

...As a group of North Carolina democrats petitioned in 1776, when "fixing the fundamental principles WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...Surveying the wreckage of the Great Depression, Roosevelt simply told his followers that "the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man," because "[a] small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor other people's lives...

...Perhaps Manning would agree with leveraged buyout king Theodore Forstmann (a member of the Cato Institute's elite donor group) that in a republic "the only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions...

...Madison himself had outlined the government's distributive purpose in 1792, asserting in the National Gazette that the "great object" of securing the republic means "withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property" and requires "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort...

...By returning to limited government and laissez-faire economic principles, we can protect our freedom, and America will be saved...

...In an 1811 letter to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, he wrote, "Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, &c., and the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings...

...But he goes no further than the New Deal in defining what this means, as if it is strictly a modern invention...

...So we have come to a time for choosing...

...The same understanding was shared by spokesmen for the numerous agrarian "regulation" movements of the revolutionary era, a force that contributed to Thomas Jefferson's political ascendancy in the 1790s...

...the GI Bill...

...The natural equality of men, people realized, could only be preserved if the state intervened to rectify legally constructed imbalances of economic power...

...In particular, the oppressive role of "judgemade" common law, governing employer contracts and property disputes, among other aspects of the economy, was a key pressure point in the popular retreat from laissez-faire...

...However, as central government absorbed and adjusted to these democratic pressures, laissez-faire theory was revived in a mutant form that divorced it from egalitarian goals...

...republican opposition by the end of George Washington's first term...

...The Republican Vision Transformed Set against this historical backdrop, the last three decades of resurgent laissez-faire can only be described as a betrayal of Jeffersonian ideals: the New Right's attack on government has been accompanied, not by growing economic equality, but by record levels of inequality...

...It is not the early American version, where the beginning of freedom is equality of productive resources, and limiting government is necessary to prevent that equality from being destroyed by wealthy elites...

...The intellectual folly of today's elite laissezfaire is captured perfectly in the Cato Institute's 2006 annual report, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and eulogizes Milton Friedman (who died late that year...

...The ideal, simply, was a system that restricted the legal and political power of the wealthy, in order to prevent them from combining against independent smallholders and those without property...

...It succeeded: nearly all of the wealth America created over the last twenty-five years was captured by the top 20 percent of households, who now pay only a penny more on the dollar WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...The Jeffersonian defense of labor's bread condemned upward redistribution, not downward redistribution...

...According to the mission statement on its Web site, its agenda of privatizing federal entitlement programs, flattening the tax code and exempting wealth from taxation, deregulating industry and finance, and slashing federal discretionary spending by 30 percent (for a start) is inspired by a "Jeffersonian DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 59 WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...The Jacksonian reformer Orestes Brownson called it "social democracy," writing in the Boston Quarterly Review in 1841 that a social democrat is in fact a "Jeffersonian Democrat," because he seeks to direct the workings of government against economic dominion, so the "actual condition of men in society shall be in harmony with their acknowledged rights as citizens...

...One important catalyst for these changes was the rise of regional and national transportation systems, which helped to integrate domestic markets, spurring competitive, large-scale enterprise to meet the growing demand...

...Nevertheless, in allowing the right to exploit the apparent contradiction between received notions of limited government and public policies designed to promote a more equal society, progressives, too, seem to have forgotten what limited government was really about in early America...

...The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue," he wrote in a letter to James Sullivan, "is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates...

...The chief movers behind the U.S...

...Warning against economic tyranny—government operating as the "tool and tyrant" of financial wealth—Madison moved rapidly into DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 61 WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...In early America, the equivalent scenario would have been a near-total absence of small family farms—something unthinkable even to the greatest landlords of the time...

...The new laissez-faire detached limited government from egalitarian goals and actively dismantled relative equality through tax changes, spending cuts, and regulatory retreat on labor and civil rights...

...Employers could change wage-and-hour terms basically at will, and they had absolute rights of discharge to reinforce this control over terms...

...Lochner v. New York (1905), casting down a state law limiting bakery workers' hours as an infringement of "liberty of contract" under the Fourteenth Amendment, was the flagship of this new "laissez-faire constitutionalism," which stymied social reforms for three decades thereafter...

...Beneath this pattern of growing inequality lie the roots of a political transformation in egalitarian thought from laissez-faire principles to progressive legislative reform...

...opponents of such goals...

...Beneath this fear of oppression, popular demand for limited government was shaped by two basic assumptions: first, that building a genuine republic depended on a broad, equitable distribution of productive property and second, that inequitable distributions of property were caused primarily by government actions that favored the rich—thus the need for limited government...

...Consider his extraordinary acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic Convention, in which he challenged the forces of "economic royalism," then rallying in a business propaganda group called the American Liberty League...

...The Real Republican Vision The New Right's "Jeffersonian philosophy" of limited government ignores the most basic historical element of laissez-faire thinking in early America: the direct, radical purpose of disabling the political power of the aristocracy...

...Charles Murray recapitulated this theme in his Clinton-era jeremiad What It Means to Be a Libertarian (1997), which begins with a long excerpt from Jefferson's First Inaugural Address and calls for the elimination of "all governmental social-service programs and all income transfers in cash or kind...

...Such thinking obviously shaped Jefferson's Draft Constitution for Virginia (1776), which stipulated that every man without property (or without adequate property) is entitled to fifty acres of public land upon reaching adulthood and, even more striking, that no one else should be permitted to appropriate public land...

...Revolt of the Elites: Part Two Despite or because of this success, a small network of businessmen, political activists, and academics, along with a handful of wealthy patrons, began organizing a counter-movement in the 1950s, building what was essentially a new political party out of the dregs of racism and the resentment of private-sector elites faced with diminishing status and power and more social costs...

...Jefferson called it democracy...

...But for Jefferson and the republiDISSENT / Summer 2008 n 6 5 WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...Limited government, in other words, was a "populist" ideal, a doctrine of the many versus the few...

...The major achievements of the New Deal and the broader legislative era it spawned— collective bargaining rights and federal wage and hour standards for most workers...

...At the same time, their rethinking of how to achieve egalitarian goals gave rise to new appropriations of laissez-faire thought by the WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...It has punished poor communities, weakened the middle class, and created a new ruling class that makes our old Loyalist enemies seem moderate and unjustly maligned...

...The new political approach, as FDR would later explain so powerfully, retained the egalitarian vision of laissez-faire while necessarily rejecting its applicability to contemporary realities, where the threat of a new aristocracy had already long been realized...

...Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property," he later wrote in a letter to James Madison...

...and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it...

...The resulting political realignment sharply affected how wealth and power are distributed in our society...

...laissez•Faire for Whom...

...And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose...

...In contrast, the Hall-Rabushkatype flat tax Cato pushes (developed by two Hoover Institution economists in the 1980s) would tax all labor earnings (including fringe benefits) and corporate profits at a single low rate, while entirely excluding capital gains and wealth from taxation...

...By comparing the welfare state with the founders' dedication to limited government, free-market conservatives fashioned a powerful tale of abandoned principles and even tyrannical intent...

...To the contrary, the kind of society the founders envisioned had no hope of survival without such innovations in government...

...Such thinking sounds right to many people because it is rarely challenged on its own historical merits...

...Most progressives seem to accept the conservative argument that our modern, active government, resting on political foundations laid in the New Deal era, goes far beyond what the founders could have contemplated or their principles allowed...

...Most striking of all, particularly from a Jeffersonian perspective (and given our continuing image as a highly entrepreneurial country), is the extraordinary concentration of active business assets in the United States...

...CLEARLY, Jefferson, Adams, and Webster were not only concerned with abstract principles of freedom, but with the material conditions of freedom or with the material "extent" of freedom...

...He is the author of God and the Welfare State (Boston Review Books/MIT Press, 2006...

...The difference is that neither Manning, Jefferson, nor Madison would view the United States today as a republic, with 10 percent of the people possessing more than 70 percent of the country's net worth and a substantial majority having little or no real wealth and very little economic independence...

...Such fears were particularly incited by Alexander Hamilton's debtfunding plan, which financed huge windfalls for wealthy bondholders in part through an excise tax on whiskey and other essential commodities...

...Yet those few who did held about 40 percent of total household wealth...

...In the revolutionary fervor of 1776, John Adams had agreed...

...What offends Jeffersonian principles is a government that "fortifies the conspiracies" of the rich and powerful (as Philadelphia republican George Logan put it in 1792), leaving ordinary people without protection from their strategies and combinations and their public disregard...

...It also survived in smallholder anti-rent movements, which fought to invalidate "Law and Order in defense of Human Rights," or in Horace Greeley's words, "the laws which give some men a thousand times as much lands as they can use and thus deprive millions of any at all . . . being contrary to the fundamental principles of our Government...

...In Jefferson's name, the government has promoted inequality, not restrained it...

...When they cut taxes, they talked about the Boston Tea Party...

...Certainly, it was not the blanket condemnation of taxes and regulation Cato would have us believe...

...In Franklin Roosevelt's victories of 1932 and 1936, this perspective was reborn and consolidated with a new electoral mandate, as the whole ideological edifice of elite laissezfaire was swept away by a massive popular tide in favor of the welfare state...

...If the "laws of this country, do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak," as Wilson wrote in The New Freedom, no one could doubt that government had failed, whatever its structure or reach...

...The common law also shielded employers from liability for workplace fatalities and injuries, and criminalized worker organizing in a famous series of "labor conspiracy" cases...

...The new laissez-faire of the Reagan-Bush era was not a revival of the founders' vision of limited government...

...Clearly, for Jefferson and Madison (as for Taylor), the republican social objective of securing a relatively equal distribution of productive property was paramount in their thinking about what government should or should not do...

...There were other aspects of liberty, of course, but preserving a rough equality of productive resources was the chief measuring stick of good (and bad) government in early America...

...John Taylor of Caroline, the leading philosopher of this movement and "keeper of the Jeffersonian conscience" (as Arthur Schlesinger put it), formulated a strong democratic theory of wealth that was renewed again and again in Democratic and third-party politics across the nineteenth century, from the Jacksonian era through the rise of Populism...

...As Jefferson himself wrote, in a letter to Madison, "[a]nother means of silently lessening the inequality of property . . . is to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise...

...As the economist Robert Solow described it, the New Right platform amounted to little more than elite plunder—"the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful...

...that is, some are masters of all means of oppression, and others want all the means of self-defence...

...Middle incomes grew 64 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 much faster than those at the top, the poverty rate was cut in half, and strong cultural norms instilled by higher education and the churches curtailed the power of business...

...Early American laissez-faire----egalitarian laissez-faire—remained a vital worldview well into the nineteenth century...

...For Cato, this is cited as a generic creed against taxes and regulation...

...If Jefferson's ideal system of universal small-scale ownership faded in the New Deal, the Jeffersonian dream of shared prosperity was never so close to being realized as then...

...Sumner conceded a property-owning ideal for all citizens, but he argued that the only thing government should do to facilitate such ownership is secure personal liberty and private property—failing to confront, of course, the existing inequality of assets and bargaining power that such a policy would only make worse...

...As legislatures began to inject new public standards into the private economy, elite laissezfaire found its last redoubt in an activist Supreme Court...

...Thus conceived, opposing government became the stock and trade of those seeking to prevent precisely what DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 63 WHAT WOULD JEFFERSON DO...

...Indeed, as a proponent of public works and social investment, Jefferson openly celebrated the collective benefits of taxing the rich...

...The introduction concludes by quoting from Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address on the definition of "good government...

...In this version, the moral idea of a natural tendency toward equality, held by antigovernment theorists in early America, was replaced by positivistic concepts of natural inequality linked to economic laws...

...by the American Liberty League thirty years before that...

...By that standard, we have reached a new low point of Jeffersonian liberty...

...LEW DALY is a senior fellow at Demos in New York City...

...The people who now claim the mantle of Jefferson reject this vision...

...Ironically, Franklin D. Roosevelt's own ideas about government took a much longer historical view, squarely confronting the seeming contradiction between extensive public welfare and early American ideals of limited government...

...Roosevelt's analysis of "economic tyranny" shared a critical assumption with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and other important founders of our country: that limited government is not an end itself, but the instrument of a particular vision of society, an egalitarian 60 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 vision...

...Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner was the great theorist of elite laissez-faire...

...What they wanted was a strong central government with the power to overturn redistributive schemes that might originate in the states (as had already occurred with some frequency in the form of debt and tax relief...

...Already by the 1830s, as property requirements for voting were gradually abolished in most states, popular pressure for anticharter laws, labor laws, and land policies favorable to free-hold settlement augured the downfall of egalitarian laissez-faire and the rise of a new egalitarian vision of active government...

...As he wrote, "A general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom . . . the very soul of a republic...

...destroy that equality and the principles of the government will be wholly corrupted, while the form remains a cloak for oppression and tyranny...

...and he is reimbursed by penalties for the loss of hope," John Taylor wrote in his influential treatise Tyranny Unmasked (1822...

...Today such a view is called "class warfare...

...Put simply, changes in the American economy rendered limited government obsolete, in terms of both practical needs and egalitarian goals...

...This led to the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the first real test of the new federal government's monopoly on legitimate violence and a turning point in the republican movement that would elevate Jefferson to the presidency (and Madison to secretary of state) in 1801...

...can movement in early America, taking from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned was a slogan of egalitarian populism and referred specifically to the Federalists' debt-funding plan, which was designed, many believed, to create a new financial aristocracy out of revenues paid by the people...

...It was a social vision in which extremes of wealth and poverty did not exist, and a relatively equal distribution of productive property secured independence and freedom for the whole citizenry...

...The people responsible for this certainly do have a philosophy of limited government...

...As one regulator theorist argued in the Cumberland Gazette of Falmouth, Maine, in 1786: "Equality of property is the life of a Republican government...

...But their limited government is the Gilded Age version, a doctrine of elite self-defense...

...The elites literally recreated laissez-faire, turning an anti-aristocratic sword into a shield for concentrated wealth...

...Reagan won in a landslide on the same basic antigovernment message offered by Goldwater sixteen years earlier...

...When it is lost, "power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form...

...Those in the richest 1 percent today hold about three times the share held by their counterparts in the late eighteenth century Such a pattern of concentrated wealth was visible already by the 1820s...

...Even Milton Friedman joined the "founding principles" crusade, arguing in his 1980 bestseller Free to Choose that the modern Democratic Party is the "greatest threat" to everything Thomas Jefferson believed in...

...Certainly no stated mission of government retreat can call itself Jeffersonian if the net result is more power and wealth at the top...

...In fact, wealth is more concentrated today than it was at the time of independence...

...As Reagan declared in The Speech, "The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people...