Agrarian Justice

So, uh, and now don't get me wrong, I think giving every kid in America, you know, a, a, basically a, a fund to start a nest egg is a great idea.

It was first proposed by Thomas Paine in 1797 in his pamphlet, Agrarian Justice.

He, he proposed having a fund for every child that they, that matures when they turn 21, and they get the equivalent of a year's salary, and that e- once you turn 50, every year you get the equivalent of two-thirds of a year's salary, which became Social Security.

So I'm not opposed to the idea, but the, the way that this is being implemented by the Trump administration is downright scary, and it is being forced upon us.

The administration is apparently continuing the practice and says they'll take this ruling to their six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

Don't get me wrong here, giving every kid a nest egg is a great idea, one first proposed, along with what became Social Security, by my hero Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice.

Because our capitalist system lets the rich easily get richer and keep the working poor in poverty, He wrote, Congress should step up, quote, to create a national fund out of which there shall be paid to every person when arrived at the age of 21 years the sum of 15 pounds sterling, which, by the way, was a year's salary at that time, as a compensation in part for the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property, and also the sum of 10 pounds per annum during life to every person now living of the age of 50 years and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

But even Paine, with his confidence that our government could do great things and insert itself into the rules of capitalism to create and maintain a middle class, wouldn't have wanted a single president, any single president, to have a file, also held by one of the nation's largest for-profit corporations, that could give the president control over the lives of every single American.

And all of them were selected as historical advocates of Georgism, or to be a little bit more precise, since Henry George himself is in here.

And you'll also see a couple of names that predate Henry George and for example Thomas Paine wrote Agrarian Justice well before Henry George came along and there were similar themes in terms of how we think of land, labor, and capital, and a lot of the themes that were later picked up by Henry George did find an occasional home in earlier economics.

So I tried to honor a spectrum of people here who either were big fans of Henry George or the single tax, the land tax in some form or another.

So you get to choose one, you get to play as Leon Walrus or Albert Einstein or whoever you want.