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+--- Thread: What did America's founding fathers think of socialism? (/thread-43013.html)
What did America's founding fathers think of socialism? - who? - 11-19-2012 01:59 AM
that's true, im sorry...my question should have been what WOULD they have thought of it...thanks for your answers, anyway.
- Michael B - 11-19-2012 02:07 AM
They had no ideas about it.
Although various political movements and theories compatible with socialism had surfaced from the 5thC BC onwards (and notably in the 15thC and 17thC AD in England with groups like the Lollards and Levellers and in France during the Revolution), socialism as a developed ideology did not arrive until the first third of the 19thC.
America's founding fathers were in principle more concerned with individual self-realisation, and in practice most concerned of all with their bank-balances.
What would they have thought of it?
They would almost certainly have been horrified. They were all well-to-do planters and bourgeois. They planned the new nation as a constitutional monarchy with the president as the elected monarch and a whole array of checks and balances, with the obvious (and stated) aim of preserving their society and their property in the form it already had.
What they would have thought of a genuinely egalitarian programme is obvious. They did not even want to free the slaves.
- JeepDiva - 11-19-2012 02:07 AM
The same opinions that they had of airports - neither one existed at the time!
- tyranny slayer - 11-19-2012 02:07 AM
if they were alive today they would declare war on d.c.
- tyranny slayer - 11-19-2012 02:07 AM
Despite the fact that socialism was not thought of when they were alive, there are some aspects that they may have agreed with.
Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man asserts that good governance contains the following:
"No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society.,,"
He favoured free education for the poor and a form of social security, funded by a gradual income tax for the wealthy.
However, he would have been against the idea of nationalised industry, and advocated small government.
Adam Smith, whose work, the Wealth of Nations, provided the economic ideological framework for the liberalism (in the economic sense) of the 19th century, and of Reagan's reforms, argued for some governmental controls over industry to prevent monopolies and the exploitation of markets, and thus the poor.