X-Treme Thomas Paine
Some people hang around on Mises.org to see what kind of amazing content we are making available now. Well, so for these folks, here is a wonderful thing. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine: Volume 1 and Volume 2. So if you dig into this, you are set for reading 2000+ pages. How's that for x-treme content? Plus, these PDFs all have very detailed navigation tools -- and, unlike Google books, you can copy and paste the text for research work or quoting. Thomas Paine lives forever!
Comments (18)
What did Mises have to say about the estate tax and Socialist Insecurity?
Published: May 5, 2008 1:24 PM
Nat,
I found this in the forward to Mises's Human Action, quoting a later part of the book:
“Paul in the year 1940 saves by paying
one hundred dollars to the national social security institution. He receives
in exchange a claim which is virtually an unconditional government IOU.
If the government spends the hundred dollars for current expenditures, no
additional capital comes into existence, and no increase in the productivity
of labor results. The government’s IOU is a check drawn upon the future
taxpayer. In 1970 a certain Peter may have to fulfill the government’s
promise although he himself does not derive any benefit from the fact that.
Paul in 1940 saved one hundred dollars.... The trumpery argument that the
public debt is no burden because ’we owe it to ourselves’ is delusive. The
Pauls of 1940 do not owe it to themselves. It is the Peters of 1970 who owe
it to the Pauls of 1940.... The statesmen of 1940 solve their problems by
shifting them to the statesmen of 1970. On that date the statesmen of 1940
will be either dead or elder statesmen glorying in their wonderful achievement,
social security.”(pp. 847- 848)
On estate taxes:
"If capitalists are faced with the likelihood that the income tax or the estate
tax will rise to 100 per cent, they will prefer to consume their capital funds
rather than to preserve them for the tax collector." (808)
... and ...
"With an excessive height of the income and estate tax rates for the very
rich, a capitalist may consider it the most advisable thing to keep all his funds
in cash or in bank balances not bearing any interest. He consumes part of
his capital, pays no income tax and reduces the inheritance tax which his
heirs will have to pay. But even if people really behave this way, their
conduct does not affect the employment of the capital available. It affects
prices. But no capital good remains uninvested on account of it. And the
operation of the market pushes investment into those lines in which it is
expected to satisfy the most urgent not yet satisfied demand of the buying
public." (811)
If you want to know what Mises said about ... well, anything, you can read his tour de force at http://mises.org/pdf/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf
Mind you, this thread is really supposed to be about Thomas Paine and his complete (and x-treme, no less) writings, but thanks for the question anyway...
~Jaq
Published: May 5, 2008 1:51 PM
The question was rhetorical. I was just wondering why a site named after Ludwig von Mises is celebrating a socialist twit.
The question was indeed on topic. You did know that Paine advocated the estate tax and social security, didn't you?
Published: May 5, 2008 2:09 PM
Nope. Sure didn't. I'm not an obviously brilliant social scientist like you.
If you want to be witty, you might need to clue in your prospective audience a tad less subtly. We may not have your background, or else we might not live our lives in ivory towers, playing the pointless, childish, and exclusionary game of "Who's a socialist twit?"
I was browsing an old textbook yesterday on artificial intelligence. One small section highlighted Noam Chomsky's contributions to linguistics and cognitive science, which in turn were invaluable to the development of AI for the next fifty years.
Chomsky is a known socialist. Shall I dismiss Chomsky as a socialist twit, and thus paint all of his ideas as devoid of value?
Can you not see the tiniest amount of fallacy here?
"Paine is a socialist. All his ideas are bad. We should not read his stuff." Yeah... and "Two legs bad. Four legs good." Mises himself would have been aghast at this. He avocated that one should read things that you don't agree with, just to test your ideas ... and perhaps to get new ones.
Moreover, you can take almost anyone from history -- before Mises, or Rand, or Rothbard, or whichever brand of hero you wear on your underroos -- and paint them as an inconsistent defender of liberty. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner whose Louisiana Purchase was extraconstitutional, for example. The eighteenth century is not a good place to try to find consistent bodies of systematic thought anyway.
So lighten up!
~Jaq
Published: May 5, 2008 3:13 PM
I'm not a Paine scholar but it seems obvious that the application of his principles ebb and flowed a bit here and there. He wrote in favor of the inheritance tax after he exiled from England and before his arrest in France. I do know this: he is one of the greatest champions of liberty ever. No one of his generation wrote as powerfully on the relationship between the individual and the state; and I also know that it is extremely difficult to find any thinker in any country who pure by modern standards who wrote before the age of Rothbard. So give the guy a break and learn what you can from him.
Published: May 5, 2008 3:31 PM
As a matter of fact, I have zero formal training in the social sciences past the eighth grade. I do hold an advanced degree in a technological field, however.
"Paine was (sic) a socialist." I did make this claim. No one here has successfully countered that claim. Nor ever will, I suspect.
"All his ideas are bad." I never made such a claim. Do not accuse me of such.
"We should not read his stuff." Again. I never made such a claim. Do not accuse me of such.
The Chomsky stuff is a non-sequitir, since you are basing it on things I did not say. So, why don't YOU lighten up?
I am not questioning making Paine's works available for sale. However, for the past week or so, this site has been championing someone, despite Mr. Tucker's claim, was not "one of the greatest champions of liberty ever." Not by a long shot. Big difference.
Published: May 5, 2008 4:36 PM
Umm, it's not for sale. These are free downloads.
I simply cannot believe that anyone would claim that Paine is a socialist. I just googled the words Paine and socialist and guess what? This blog post came up.
Published: May 5, 2008 4:47 PM
Jeffrey,
Don't bother feeding the troll. He's made an unsubstantiated claim and left the impossible negative proof up to you. Funny, my experience has been that advanced technical degrees usually come with some modicum of scientific training, particularly on how to avoid these kinds of simple fallacies. Mine sure did.
~jaq
Published: May 5, 2008 5:57 PM
sorry to latch on to a more prosaic part of the intro, but is it only this pdf file that can be cut and pasted?
not being it savvy, i haven't been able to do this with other pdf files i've downloaded from mises.org.
is this my tech ineptitude, or does it depend on the pdf file?
Published: May 5, 2008 7:27 PM
I always considered Paine to be the more radical than most during the period. That's why I like him.
Published: May 5, 2008 8:15 PM
newson: depends on the file - some of them are scans of old books, thus images not text; obviously you can't grab text out of those (other than via OCR). I think most are text, though.
Also depends what software you're using to read them, of course...
Published: May 5, 2008 9:23 PM
"...and, unlike Google books, you can copy and paste the text for research work or quoting."
Nice. Thank you, LvMI.
Published: May 5, 2008 11:03 PM
For some reason, a good number of the links on thomaspaine.org are down. So this outdoes any other Thomas Paine online collection in my book. Dare I say that it beats the library of congress on this one (I haven't checked). Thank you and congratulations
Published: May 5, 2008 11:37 PM
"He's made an unsubstantiated claim..."
It is not an unsubstantiated claim. The facts are available in history. Paine's politics toward the end of his life are seriously un-attractive to anyone interested in liberty. He did invaluable service to the American Revolution -- it is not a stretch to say that it would not have happened without him -- but his infatuation with the French Revolution was his ruin. All of that should be easy enough to figure out.
Published: May 6, 2008 8:46 AM
thank you, peter.
Published: May 6, 2008 10:59 AM
So lets go find some authors who were never wrong on any subject! I'll happily buy copies of their books, if you can find them.
Published: May 6, 2008 1:27 PM
To those that assert that Thomas Paine was a socialist: Exactly where may Paine be quoted as saying something like "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."? Please quote enough of the paragraph, edition, page number to enable a scholar's verification.
Thank you in advance for your polite co-operation.
Published: May 7, 2008 12:01 AM
Years ago I read a damning essay on Paine by Robert Graves. Is anyone familiar with it? My memory might be playing tricks.
Published: May 7, 2008 1:21 AM