Yo..."Constitutionalists"...

[OL FU]

I am quite certain promoting the general welfare was meant to make sure already rich white guys could make a lot of money

Didn't have a damn thing to do with handing out anything to anybody that wasn't a rich white guy.

Not all of them.

Thomas Paine, 1795:

Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state.

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.

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.
The property owners owe rent to those who do not own property for the privilege of cultivating the land, and taking away the natural ownership that all people have.

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 afterwords 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

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.

t is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of civilization (and the practice merits not to be called either charity or policy) to make some provision for persons becoming poor and wretched only at the time they become so. Would it not, even as a matter of economy, be far better to adopt means to prevent their becoming poor? This can best be done by making every person when arrived at the age of twenty-one years an inheritor of something to begin with.

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Was Thomas Paine part of the Constitutional congress?

[Ibanez]

Not all of them.

Thomas Paine, 1795:














http://www.constitution.org/tp/agjustice.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Was Thomas Paine part of the Constitutional congress?

Eh, he was a commission secretary to the Congress but was forced out, IIRC.

He only came to the US to escape going to debtors prison. He wrote two, highly influential pamphlets in 1776(for the American Revolution) and was ostracized at the time of his death. I think 4 or 5 people were at his funeral. He had some revolutionary ideas like the emancipation of slaves but overall he was a flake(like most "philosophers" I guess). As a person, he was alright. As a revolutionary, he is exactly what America needed at the time. I'm not savvy in respect to his involvement with the French Revolution, but his ideas were exactly the ones that needed to be made public to rally support of the common man.