The Roots of Social Security: Thomas Paine

by: Jennifer Daler

Thu Jul 14, 2011 at 08:39:14 AM EDT

Paine also authored another pamphlet, this one less well known but no less important. It is called Agrarian Justice, and in it we find a social insurance plan for both the elderly and those just starting out in life.

From Social Security Online:

The benefits were to be paid from a national fund accumulated for this purpose. The fund was to be financed by a 10% tax on inherited property. A tax on inherited property was used due to Paine's general philosophy of property rights.

The pamphlet was written in French during the winter of 1795-1796. Paine was living in France at the time and was involved with the beginning stages of the French Revolution. It was published in English in 1797.

on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

Paine says that it is not possible to go from a "civilized" to a "natural" state. One reason is that the amount of land required to support the population would simply not be available. He also states, rightly,  that despite the fact that civilization's purpose should be to improve the lot of human beings, millions of people born in the "civilized" world would have been better off if they had been born in the "natural state".

Paine puts the beginning of poverty with the possession of land that began with cultivation and the advent of private property. He says while cultivation has given to the earth a "tenfold value", it has also created the "greatest evil" by dispossessing the majority of their "natural inheritance" through "landed monopoly.
(bold mine)

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings

Now to the plan:

To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, 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 ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

Paine details the inheritance tax in the pamphlet very specifically and  for eighteenth century conditions.

So was Thomas Paine a "commie" whose death nine years before Marx's birth is merely a minor detail? Or did he consider access to food, clothing, shelter, health care and other needs to be a right in a free society?

Paine's concept, if not his method, was adopted 126 years after his death. It shows that the idea that government should help alleviate social injustice is not a socialist plot, but was there at the beginning of our nation.