{"id":406,"date":"2011-03-16T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=406"},"modified":"2011-03-16T15:12:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T19:12:00","slug":"what-would-jefferson-do-dissent-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=406","title":{"rendered":"What Would Jefferson Do?&#8230;Dissent Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dissentmagazine.org\/article\/?article=1232\">Dissent Magazine &#8211; What Would Jefferson Do? How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: black;\">Surveying the wreckage of the Great Depression,<br \/>Roosevelt simply told his followers that \u201cthe average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man,\u201d because \u201c[a] small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people\u2019s property, other people\u2019s money, other people\u2019s labor\u2014other people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Roosevelt\u2019s analysis of \u201ceconomic tyranny\u201d shared a critical assumption with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and other important founders of our country: that limited government is not an end itself, but the instrument of a particular vision of society, an egalitarian vision. It was a social vision in which extremes of wealth and poverty did not exist, and a relatively equal distribution of productive property secured independence and freedom for the whole citizenry. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As historian James L. Huston writes, it was against the \u201cpolitical economy of aristocracy,\u201d government organized by and for a small, wealthy elite, that supporters of the American revolution embraced the \u201cegalitarian promise of the negative state.\u201d The ideal, simply, was a system that restricted the legal and political power of the wealthy, in order to prevent them from combining against independent smallholders and those without property. Limited government, in other words, was a \u201cpopulist\u201d ideal, a doctrine of the many versus the few. As a group of North Carolina democrats petitioned in 1776, when \u201cfixing the fundamental principles of Government,\u201d the goal should be to \u201coppose everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich and chief men exercised to the oppression of the poor.\u201d<br \/>&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<br \/>Clearly, for Jefferson and Madison (as for Taylor), the republican social objective of securing a relatively equal distribution of productive property was paramount in their thinking about what government should or should not do.<br \/>&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>OK, just go read it already!<\/span>&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dissent Magazine &#8211; What Would Jefferson Do? How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down Surveying the wreckage of the Great Depression,Roosevelt simply told his followers that \u201cthe average man once &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=406\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What Would Jefferson Do?&#8230;Dissent Magazine&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contrarian-economics"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}