The Founders were Marxists! Who knew?

Reading a lively discussion on Atrios’ blog about the article linked in the post below, there is a debate about Bobo Brooks saying that “Most Americans do not have Marxian categories in their heads,” and it reminded me that the GOP seems unaware of the great mistrust of wealth inequality in this country going a little further back than old Karl (and I’m not talking about Rove.)

In an 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.”

Now, Jefferson may have been dead for 40 years when Marx published Das Kapital, but apparently he was a Marxist, being a proponent of “class warfare” and all.

And old Teddy Roosevelt actually WAS a Marxist, because in 1906 he said, while arguing for a graduated inheritance tax and a progressive income tax:

“The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”

Talk about class warfare! My God, didn’t he realize that he was cruelly punishing the most productive and hard working members of society who were just trying to keep their hard earned money so they could spend it on antiques and fine art and thus produce jobs for dead people?

Bobo tells us that Americans are just not receptive to arguments based upon “envy.” (Perhaps, although I certainly don’t see that Americans are lacking in that, any more than any other deadly sin. Bobo needs to take a good look around him at one of those DC cocktail parties if he wants to look into the eyes of the green eyed monster up close and personal.)

Kevin Phillips, with his usual insight, tells us in his book “Wealth and Democracy” and in a timely op-ed in yesterdays LA Times, that Bobo and the rest of the fat cat, investor class Republicans who are trying to press this line, are not only corruptly self-dealing in ways that Harding and his crew could only dream of, but they are badly misreading the political history of this nation. The Republicans have had their asses kicked repeatedly on this issue, but they can’t help themselves.

[…]

Historically, this is the great Republican Achilles’ heel — favoritism to the rich. The 2003 Bush tax cut proposal is the biggest, baldest example since the 1920s, when Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon decided that if Congress wouldn’t let him cut income tax rates enough he’d just start giving money back, to individuals and corporations alike, through Treasury refunds, rebates and remissions. Given this recurrent thread over eight decades of GOP fiscal history, White House and congressional Republicans may be setting up a dangerous issue for the 2004 elections.

[…]

Will the Democrats, who in recent years have baa-baaed around Washington like clueless sheep on an Idaho hillside, somehow turn and swing this issue like a political power saw? They show some movement, but they have displayed too little knowledge of their own history — Thomas Jefferson’s fear of the money power; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s bold use of the inheritance tax; Harry S. Truman’s lambasting of Wall Street — to assume that they can call up a memory of the Republican fiscal heritage, however vulnerable.

Yet, the vulnerability is potentially huge. As Bush fiscal policy suns itself in the mentality of Coolidge-Hoover-era Treasury Secretary Mellon, it disdains the better legacies of other GOP presidents. Dwight D. Eisenhower favored taxes on excess wartime profits; Richard Nixon signed legislation imposing a higher top tax rate on unearned, rather than earned, income; Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform insisted on equal top rates for earned versus stock-market income, eliminating the preference for capital gains. The first President Bush was the succeeding president who cried incessantly to restore capital-gains favoritism to investors. We should also mention Theodore Roosevelt, who called in peacetime for the progressive tax on large inherited fortunes that George W. Bush works to eliminate in wartime; and Abraham Lincoln, whose wartime taxes covered dividend income.

The Lincoln-Roosevelt-Eisenhower-Nixon-Reagan viewpoint still commands a fair minority of the Republican rank and file, if not among its Bush-era leadership. The only major Republican voice speaking for the old party, however, is that of McCain, who said in December, “We probably need to have tax cuts directed at lower-income Americans, such as payroll-tax reductions. … [L]ow-income Americans in totality bear a much higher tax burden than wealthy Americans do; therefore, there is a growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans.” He scoffed at the notion that Bush’s tax policy embodies compassionate conservatism. McCain’s father and grandfather were four-star admirals; he learned a different tradition than that of the tax-shelter sale.