# Thomas Paine The most radical of the Founders — the immigrant pamphleteer who argued that monarchy was an absurdity, that organized religion was a fraud, that the poor deserved public support, and that democracy was not a concession to human weakness but the **only legitimate form of government**. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) wrote *[[Common Sense]]* (1776), which converted the colonial grievance into a revolutionary cause, and *Rights of Man* (1791), which defended the [[French Revolution]] and proposed what would now be called a welfare state — progressive taxation, public education, old-age pensions, and public works employment. Paine matters to the KB for two reasons: he is the Founder the Christian nationalists cannot accommodate (he was an explicit deist who called organized Christianity a "human invention set up to terrify and enslave mankind"), and he is the Founder the Tea Party and MAGA movement most cynically appropriated (adopting his revolutionary rhetoric while rejecting every substantive position he held). ## Core Ideas ### Common Sense and Popular Sovereignty *Common Sense* (January 1776) was the most widely read political pamphlet in American history — an estimated 500,000 copies in a population of 2.5 million. Paine's argument was radical in its simplicity: **hereditary monarchy is absurd**, aristocracy is parasitic, and the only legitimate authority is the **direct consent of the people**. He rejected not just George III but the *concept* of monarchy itself — going far beyond the moderate colonial position (which merely objected to specific policies) to argue for full republican self-governance. ### Rights of Man *Rights of Man* (1791–92), written in defense of the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's conservative critique, extended Paine's arguments into a full program: natural rights belong to every person, government exists only to protect them, and when government fails it should be replaced. Part Two proposed specific social policies: progressive taxation, old-age pensions, public education, maternity benefits, and public employment programs. This is the earliest articulation of the modern welfare state by a major Enlightenment thinker. ### Agrarian Justice Paine's 1797 pamphlet *Agrarian Justice* proposed a **[[Universal Basic Income]]** funded by a tax on land inheritance — arguing that the earth was the common property of humanity and that private property in land created an obligation to compensate those excluded from it. Crucially, Paine framed it as *compensation for an enclosure*, not charity: landholders owe ground-rent to everyone excluded from what was once common. That property-rights framing is why the idea's lineage runs through the right as much as the left — [[Milton Friedman]]'s [[Negative Income Tax]] and [[Charles Murray]]'s *[[In Our Hands]]* both descend from it, as does [[Andrew Yang]]'s Freedom Dividend and the current tech-right response to [[Technological Unemployment]]. Paine's argument is also the one actually operating in American law: the [[Alaska Permanent Fund]] pays every resident a share of mineral royalties on precisely his logic — the subsurface is commonly owned, so extraction owes a dividend to all. Alaskans do not call it welfare, which is the whole point of the framing. ### The Age of Reason Paine's deist critique of organized religion (1794–1807) earned him more enemies than any of his political works. He argued that the Bible was a human document, that organized Christianity was a system of "priestcraft" designed to control populations, and that the only honest religion was the contemplation of nature. The Age of Reason made Paine a pariah in his final years — and makes him the Founder that [[David Barton]]'s Christian-nation mythology must either distort or ignore. ## How This Is Appropriated and Attacked Paine's relationship to the modern right is the KB's purest example of **rhetorical appropriation without substantive engagement**: | Paine's Position | Right-Wing Appropriation | The Actual Position | |-----------------|------------------------|-------------------| | Revolutionary rhetoric | Tea Party "Don't Tread on Me" / MAGA populism | Paine's revolution was *against* aristocratic wealth and hereditary privilege — the very things the donor-class right defends | | Anti-government language | Libertarian / small-government conservatism | Paine opposed monarchy and aristocracy, not government itself; he proposed *more* government programs (pensions, education, employment) than any other Founder | | "Common sense" framing | Conservative appeals to common sense against "elites" | Paine's common sense was that the poor deserved support, religion was a fraud, and monarchy was absurd — none of which align with MAGA | | Deism / religious freedom | Ignored or distorted | Paine was the most anti-religious of the Founders — an inconvenient fact for Christian nationalism's founding narrative | ## KB Significance **1. The Founder they can't use.** Paine is the stress test for every claim about the Founders' intentions. If the Founders were Christians who intended a Christian nation (Barton's claim), what do you do with Paine — who called Christianity "too absurd for belief"? If the Founders opposed government programs (Tea Party's claim), what do you do with Paine — who proposed progressive taxation, pensions, and a proto-UBI? **2. The welfare state's American ancestor.** Paine's *Rights of Man* and *Agrarian Justice* prove that the welfare state is not a European import but an idea present at the American founding. The right's claim that social programs are un-American requires erasing Paine from the founding narrative — which is exactly what happens. **3. The appropriation case study.** The Tea Party's use of Paine's language and imagery while opposing everything he stood for is the KB's cleanest example of how the right mines the founding for rhetorical authority while discarding the founding's substantive commitments. ## See Also - [[Common Sense]] — Paine's revolutionary pamphlet - [[Edmund Burke]] — Paine's great conservative antagonist - [[Reflections on the Revolution in France]] — Burke's text that provoked *Rights of Man* - [[Burke vs Paine Timeline]] — the chronology of their rivalry - [[Popular Sovereignty]] — The principle Paine championed - [[The Social Safety Net]] — The policy tradition Paine inaugurated - [[Thomas Jefferson]] — Paine's closest ideological ally among the Founders - [[David Barton]] — The pseudo-historian who must erase or distort Paine - [[Tea Party Movement]] — The movement that appropriated Paine's rhetoric