The Washington administration forced citizens to buy guns with their own money. The gov’t of Massachucettes under John Hancock required people to belong to a Church, the Adams Administration made speaking out against the gov’t illegal, Jefferson’s Virginia castrated males committing sodomy, etc.
In short, I think many of the founders were in many areas comfortable with a far more intrusive gov’t then we would be today.
In 1794, the sitting President personally commanded a militia of 15,000 soldiers to collect the whisky tax from rebellious farmersin Pennsylvania.
For some in our current politics everything left of Mussolini is a socialist.
I’ve had debates with people who really believe Hitler was a leftist. :rolleyes:
They just didn’t want the federal government doing the intruding.
Two out of the four examples I gave involved the federal gov’t.
“It’s called National Socialism, so that means he has to have been a leftist!”
Generally overlapping with the kind of people who think that science = atheism = Satanism = Communism.
Adam Smith is better fun still:
“Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.”
Actually there was a sort of leftist element in the early Nazi Party, but it was purged.
Franklin was a compromiser by nature. He was good at getting along with all kinds of people. A big part of that was to allow them to see what they wanted to see in him but also there was his flexibility. He was for the Stamp Act before he was against it. As Enter the Flagon points out, late in life he came to oppose slavery. Yet when as the president of the major abolition society in the former colonies he was given their anti-slavery petition to present to the constitutional convention in 1787 he declined to do so. A unicameralist, he made no protest to the bicameralism of the federal constitution or the new Pennsylvania constitution a few years later. While today he would be skewered as a flip-flopper his compromising was valuable. He was one of the few major politicians who could bridge the Constitutionalists and Republicans in Pennsylvania at a time when political instability in the Keystone State could threaten the outcome of the American Revolution. And his influence in lubricating the ways in the contentious convention to create the Constitution have been seriously under-appreciated, IMO.
As has been pointed out, socialism wasn’t around when he was. But if you put him in a country of socialists, he would have been able to fit right in. That was his genius. What was around in his day was the split between the traditional view of society as a web of rights and obligations and the new market-oriented values of the commercial class. Offhand I can’t think of Franklin weighing in on any of these disputes which could get quite violent (the Fort Wilson Riot being the prime example in his state) but I expect that as usual he straddled the divide.
If only the 21st century USA frame of reference was availabe to guys like Franklin, Engels and Marx, they would surely have realised their leftfield errors.
Fwiw, this is another classically parochial SDMB thread.
How did such a flip-flopper ever make up his mind to commit to something as radical as Revolution and Independence? (Which could get all the signers of the DOI hanged if they lost.)
Viewed from today the decision to leave the British Empire and strike out in a new form of government seems remarkable but it really wasn’t back then. The colonies had gone to war to maintain the status quo. They had gotten used to running their own affairs for the most part after decades of “benign neglect” and didn’t like London’s new take charge attitude. By the summer of 1776 the colonies had already been fighting the mother country for 2 years. The early selfless patriotism and optimism had ebbed. In order to move forward they needed more outside help and that could only be had from Britain’s enemies who had no reason to invest enough to finish the rebellion. Once over the colonies would go back to working in harmony with London. But if they declared independence then the war could end with the new states allied with the Catholic powers.
With the chance to end the war on a status quo ante basis gone colonial leaders were faced with only 2 choices. Declare independence or knuckle under and throw themselves on the mercy of the crown. The large majority, including Franklin, decided to fight on. If they won things would be closer to how they had been before than if they had lost.
(And please, not the Lind piece again. The guy is clueless about the Whiskey Rebellion.)
Specifically?
Revolutionaries get the chicks’ panties all moist.
He gets some details wrong but the main thing is that contrary to his thesis the “Whiskey Rebels” had a fine understanding of their economic situation and it is Micheal Lind who is deeply confused about what happened.
Resistance to the tax was not limited to Pennsylvania but universal along the frontier. And for good reason. The tax could only be paid in gold and there was a shortage of hard currency everywhere in the former colonies but especially inland. With no good roads or water routes back to the eastern cities Americans living over the mountains could not get any agricultural products to market except by distilling them. Whiskey was more than just the only way to have a cash crop, it was cash itself. Reasonably fungible and preservable it was used in exchange when people didn’t have products their trading partner wanted.
Hamilton’s tax was deliberately designed to fall lighter on large distillers. The less whiskey you produced the higher the cost per gallon. There were no large distilleries in the West. If people along the frontier had obeyed the law their small producers would have went out of business. They would have had no way to market their crops, no money, no reasonable replacement for money, and no whiskey to drown their immense sorrows. Hamilton’s plan, like that of Massachusetts that he mentions, had a major flaw. There just wasn’t enough gold in the new states for them to work. Both plans provoked the same response: rebellion. Western people decided to fight rather than see so many of their friends and neighbors lose their lands.
So Lind’s comparison of these “Whiskey Rebels” with Teabaggers as 2 groups acting against their own interests is deeply flawed. Ironically Western Pennsylvania’s economic situation improved after the military forces occupied them. The troops terrorized neighborhoods for a while, sure. But they were also paid in desperately needed coin laboriously hauled over the mountains.
Enlightening, 2sense, and once again ignorance is fought.
Hmmm . . . Maybe if the Army were to occupy Sun City Center . . .
