I read with a great deal of interest Prof. David Morris’s column on Thomas Paine (“The Long-Lasting Influence of Common Sense”). Readers should understand that Paine did not stop with the most cogent and perhaps first-published arguments on why the Americans should separate from the British Empire. He also wrote, just a few years later, two of the most important tracts on why society must care for its less fortunate citizens, in the second part of Rights of Man (1792) and Agrarian Justice (1797).

In those two works, he laid out a social welfare program that in today’s world, had he known about it, might even encompass the Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court upheld just a few weeks ago. He favored social security for the aged, educational benefits for young people and other programs that many of us take for granted in the 21st century. Where was the money to come from to pay for it? The wealthy, who can afford higher taxes, and even inheritance taxes on the rich, what our conservative friends prefer to term “the death tax.” Paine was truly a visionary, and while we may never know for certain how many of his works were sold (no records were kept), he did write some of the period’s great best-sellers.

Jack Fruchtman
Aquinnah

Jack Fruchtman’s most recent book is The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).