Thom Hartmann's essay, "Scrooge & Marley, Inc. — The True Conservative Agenda," includes some wonderful comments on democracy and wealth from the third president, Thomas Jefferson. Such as:
"Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge."
(from an 1817 letter to Dr. John Manners)
I don't quite agree with everything Hartmann advocates in his piece, but he is right about this:
… a middle class is the creation of government participation (conservatives call it "interference") in the marketplace, by determining the rules of the game of business and of taxation, and by providing free public education to all.
Hartmann writes in defense of these three government activities and their necessity for the continued existence of a healthy middle class, which he rightly notes is a prerequisite for a healthy democracy.
He cites Jefferson again on the third point, taxation:
Progressive taxation has a long history: As Jefferson said in a 1785 letter to James Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." …
As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1784, "Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual."
Jefferson's reference to "what may be annually spared," alongside Hartmann's description of a Dickensian existence in a society without a middle class, reminded me of Mr. Micawber's famous calculation in David Copperfield:
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
Since taxes constitute a part of each person's "annual expenditure," Micawber's advice hints at the reason for, and the reasonableness of, progressive taxation. An American paraphrase of Micawber might be:
"Annual income $24,000, annual expenditures $23,500 and annual taxes $2,000, result misery. Annual income $240,000, annual expenditures $200,000 and annual taxes $25,000, result happiness."
The past three years have seen a radical restructuring of America's tax code. Jefferson's notion that "Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual" seems not to have influenced this process.
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