The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0405; Banks/Capitalism

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hours produced by High Plains Public Radio and new Enlightenment Radio Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in January of 2004 and the topics covered concern our banking system, the coming of capitalism, and the issue of equality for all. Please join us as our host, Bill Crystal, speaks with Thomas Jefferson, portrayed by humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Good day to you, Citizen. Mr. Jefferson, today we have listener questions to guide us through this program. That's always one thing I know that you especially enjoy. I trust the voice of the people. The voice of the people indeed, and even though you lived in a different time, you're willing to jump out of that period and to speak to our own situation today. Well, with some reluctance, I don't like to jump,

but I am willing to project carefully to a world that I didn't live to see, but I'm actually most comfortable speaking in my own time and place because, of course, I lived between 1743 and 1826. That's the world that I knew, and it was a largely pre-industrial world that was a pre-capital world. Mr. Jefferson, let's, without further ado, take our first listener question. This comes from Jeff Kendall. Dear Mr. Jefferson, I am reading the creature from Jekyll Island, a book that describes our current banking system. If you were alive and had the power to do so, what would you do with or to the federal reserve and our current banking system? Let me say that I am almost entirely incompetent on questions of this sort that I am not a finance here, and it became clear to me in working with Albert Gallatin, who was my secretary of the Treasury, a brilliant, gifted man equal, I think, in genius to Colonel Hamilton and more so in my view,

but I never really understood what Albert Gallatin was doing. I looked upon the nation's finances in a very simple way that it's like a family. You don't spend more than you take in if you can avoid it. You have to be careful to know before you decide on a spending spree, you have to know where that income is going to come from, and that it's important that a nation be honorable in its financial dealings, so they're a very simplistic view, and I frankly didn't really understand Colonel Hamilton's view that a national debt would become a basis for leveraging capital activity. This struck me as metaphysics, so I have to say there are very few questions that I can express real incompetence about. This is one of them. Here's what I would say that you have created an independent banking system, the Federal Reserve System, which is mostly autonomous. That is, it is not directly controlled by the people of the United States. We have three branches in our national government, the legislative branch,

and the executive branch have very little control over the Federal Reserve System, which is part of, I think, its purpose that it would be independent of politics. That frightens me because I believe that the people are sovereign, that politics is the way in which a sovereign people expresses its will, that if you create a centerpiece of your national economic engine, which is separate from the will of the people, the chances of abuse, the chances that the people's happiness will somehow be subordinated to something that's deemed to be a higher good. I think those are quite probable, and it frightens me. But, let me say this, there are a consumer capitalist merchandising nation, as you are, then probably you need centralized coordinated banking, and probably given the complexities of the national and international economic system, some of these concerns are probably too complex for average legislators, so it may be that given your interest

in living in a spending consumerist sort of world, it may be that it's right for you to yield some of your sovereignty to financial experts, but I have to say it frightens me. Now, Mr. Jefferson, you did have misgivings about the proposals that Mr. Hamilton was making when he was Secretary of the Treasury. Yes, but for two reasons, though, primarily because I considered Colonel Hamilton's plan for a national bank to be unconstitutional. In other words, I read the Constitution strictly, and when I looked at the articles of the Constitution, nothing legitimated a national bank. Colonel Hamilton said that this was an implied power, that the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution basically grants to government the right to do those things which would help to facilitate something else which is necessary and proper to our national constitutional activity, and therefore because the National Government coordinates finance with respect to European powers

and also coordinates interstate commerce, that this means that if a bank is the way to make that efficient, that the Constitutionally based right for the Congress to regulate certain types of economic activity, thus legitimates a national bank as the tool with which to do that. I disagree. I believe that a national bank was not implied, and I think that if you're going to read the general welfare clause and the necessary and proper clause and so elastic away that virtually anything is legitimated. So I'm frightened of implied powers, and my view was if a national bank is that important, and I frankly doubted it, that there ought to be a constitutional amendment to authorize it, go back to the people and say, we now find we need a national bank, will you grant us the authority to create one? So that was my primary concern that Colonel Hamilton was creating a metaphysical system of perverting the basis of our freedom by using implied powers to legitimate whatever he thought was important at any given time. My second concern was a very simple one.

I'm not really fond of central banking or banking, and I prefer it us to stay in a much simpler economy, which was agrarian pastoral, and in some regards even a barter economy. And deep down inside, I think you suspected as did many of your peers that Colonel Hamilton was creating a system by which he and his own close friends were going to profit. So indeed, because I'm a physiocrat, let me just explain that to our listeners, a physiocrat is of a French economic school, but not exclusive to France, that believes that all wealth comes from the earth, that the earth is our bounty. If you drop a seed in the soil, and it rains, 100 seeds will sprout. If you breed swine, you will produce a litter of piglets, and that will create wealth that comes as it were out of nothing. I believe that all legitimate wealth comes from the earth's fecundity, and when humans cooperate with the natural fertility and fecundity of the earth, they produce wealth.

That's why I believe farmers are the chosen people of God, because they are the cooperating agents with nature and nature's God. But when you get into the world of finance, where one capitalist like Robert Morris of Philadelphia can invest $100,000 in a corporation and do no work. Just give money on loan at interest to that corporation. And that somehow brings him enormous profits, and yet he never got his hands in the soil. He never lifted a bail. He never fed a hog or a chicken. That strikes me as illegitimate in some sense. And so it's not that I'm against a financial system altogether, but I think it needs to be rooted in the soil, and that when it begins to abstract unnecessarily that that creates possibilities of corruption. You certainly must be appalled by the futures markets that exist in modern America. I called it stock-jobbing. When somebody who's doing no actual work

speculates on the profitability of certain industries and predicts whether they will be profitable or not down the road, that's a way of making money on the backs of honest farmers without doing the hard work that those farmers do to produce wealth. And I think those who actually produce wealth, sailors, farmers, artisans, craftsmen, that these are the real basis of an economy. And it's not that they are to be preferred to wealthy investors, but they should have a certain kind of primacy, at least in our national moral code. And I was sorry to see just beginning the new constitutional order in 1789 and 90 and 91, that already the speculator class was trying to warp our governments so that it would favor their enterprise and look without any real sympathy at the work of farmers. Well, I think what they did in terms of buying up the loans

during the revolutionary period, loans made during the revolutionary period with hard currency, and then profiting greatly at the misfortune of other people should have suggested to you that something rotten was afoot. Well, indeed, what you're referring to is the credit and debt crisis in which Mr. Hamilton rightly said, I think that the government of the United States should redeem the war bonds at PAR. In other words, if a family in Carolina bought a bond to help us win the war of national independence, and they spent $100 to buy that bond, that bond should be redeemed at at least $100, and perhaps more with the interest that will have accrued. But as you all know, those bonds had become virtually worthless, and many people felt that they would never be redeemed. And so people began to use them as a kind of species of currency, and so somebody would sell his $100 war bond for $12 worth of groceries, or for $50 worth of clothing, thinking that's all the value who's ever going to get out of that.

And so people were beginning to use them as fungible assets. They felt they couldn't wait for the time when government might redeem them, and that they didn't expect government to redeem them at PAR. And frankly, most people thought they would never be redeemed at all, that that was just lost currency. And so these bonds had plummeted in the market to $0.10 on the dollar, $0.3 on the dollar, and so on. And the speculator class felt, you know, what $50 may be really important to a farmer in Virginia, but it's not a great loss to a speculator. So I'll buy that bond, and maybe government will redeem it at $0.60 or $0.70, and I'll make a profit on them. That's capitalism. What bothered me when Colonel Hamilton provided his plan to redeem the war bonds at PAR was that he told his cronies first. So this is insider trading tips and conflict of interest. These would be the kinds of crimes that would get one thrown in a jail in your time. He told his pals first before he made the announcement to the nation, and his friends were able then his cronies were able to go out and buy those bonds

in their depreciated way, and then wait until the government announcement to redeem them at PAR and make windfall profits. But the real work, of course, had been done by the farmers, the little people who had sacrificed what little money they had to help support the cause of independence. And so I agreed with my closest friend James Madison that there should be discrimination that original holders should get automatic PAR, but speculators should get reduced profits, not no profits, but reduced profits for their act of speculation. And Hamilton's view was, you either are a capitalist or you're not, and if you're a capitalist, the farmer who bought that bond freely sold it, he should have waited if he didn't wait, then he loses, and the people who are willing to buy those bonds are clever and deserve to be rewarded, and that's how you create an engine of prosperity. And that would seem to be the America of today. Government has to step in on a regular basis, because that sort of insider trading is done routinely. Well, you do have regulations to prevent it,

but apparently there's widespread cheating in your time, but really let's go to the basis of this. The great question that had to be settled in the first 25 years of our new constitutional law to beginning in 1787 was, what is America about? What is the meaning of America? And Hamilton and his crony, John Marshall, my cousin, two exceedingly influential men, argued that the real purpose of America was to make it safe for capitalist activity. In other words, the contract was king that stable finances were paramount that making the nation capable of enormous national, local, state, and international prosperity was the true meaning of America. That, frankly, for most people listening to this program is the de facto true meaning of America in your time. So you are Hamiltonians. My view, and it was a view held by hundreds of thousands and I think millions of Americans was that the meaning of America

was something nobler, more fundamentally just and decent than pure capitalism, that there was a moral dimension to the economic order, and that we should somehow create conditions of greater fairness in our economic order than what was happening in England, which was enjoying a capitalist revolution and an industrial revolution. In other words, I would have created some sort of moral tethering to the economy from the beginning. That was inefficient, I will admit. It would have hamstrung our national prosperity. I will admit, but it would have been infinitely more fair. And frankly, I think the United States took a wrong turn between 1787 and 1820 and became a capitalist nation rather than a nation of free and equal men. There seems to be no moral tethering today at all, Mr. Jefferson, that only the law steps in to restrain access. Well, law is one of the ways in which an advanced economy does restrain criminal activity, and I'm sorry it came to that

because I would have preferred customary codes of self-restraint. I think that's what agriculture does. You know, ties people to nature, and they are inevitably more decent and more virtuous because they are linked to husbandry. You know, if you raise goats, you understand something about the nature of existence on earth that you don't understand if you're a stock speculator in New York City or Baltimore. I truly believe, not everyone will agree with me. So this is the dilemma of American life, and ideally you would have people so enlightened that they would behave within enlightened self-interest rather than naked self-interest. What bothers me about your time, if I may just quickly articulate it, is that the Americans are so committed to consumer capitalism in your time that you don't even care whether you're basic fruits of life or manufactured within your own country. In other words, an American going to a shop will buy the cheapest ex irrespective of where it was made and under what social and economic conditions it was made.

So not only is there no tethering to prevent runaway corruption within American capitalism, but in respect to your place in the world, the American consumer believes that the inexpensiveness of a thing is its own justification for purchasing it and makes no significant inquiries into the nature of the production of that item elsewhere. Or of the country in which it's produced, and in many cases, the countries in which the cheapest good is produced is a place where there is no freedom and where people are routinely thrown in jail without habeas corpus. And of course, it must be added to this that all of this has a profound influence on your foreign policy. In other words, if your foreign policy is really a consumerist foreign policy that says, bring cheap goods here, then that means your national, your state department and international foreign policy will be directed to ensuring that rather than justice in the world, the United States standing for certain principles,

rebuking nations which are violative of the rights of their citizens or their workers, that you will, your concerns are more about keeping the economy lubricated than they are about living in a world that is just and virtuous. And that is how you would see the United States today, sir? Well, I'm wary of speaking like Jeremiah from the Old Testament and pronouncing doom upon your moral codes, but I do believe that we were better when we were a continent of resources, largely generating its own fruits from within. And I think to the extent that you take a purely consumerist view of life that you inevitably will become corrupt, that that's what we in my time would have called luxury, but it basically means that when you detach the things you consume entirely from the manner in which they are produced and the place which generated them, you are inevitably a corrupt people.

It seems hard to imagine a blacksmith who has a person working for him, paying that person a hundred times less than he made or even a thousand times less than he made, and yet routinely in modern American society, the person at the head of the corporation will make a thousand times more than an employee doing something vital within the organization. Well, that's certainly true. I'm a student of Adam Smith, his wealth of nations was published in 1776, the same year as my Declaration of Independence. I do believe in the free flow of goods and services, but there are limits, of course, to what one ought to accept in terms of the freedom of exchange, because these are not truly free exchanges. They may be free in Ohio, but they're corrupt in Taiwan. They may be free in New York, but they are the result of a form of wage slavery in Guam or the Mariana Islands. That frightens me somewhat, but it also has a deeper, erosive value on community.

In an ideal community, we aren't all just farmers. Most of us will be farmers, I think, because self-sufficiency is the key, but we have enough abundance of that one of you is a preacher and another person shoots horses, and a third person is the school teacher, so we differentiate labor, and if we agree to do that as a way of generating more creativity and efficiency on our culture, and then instead of getting my shoes hoist by you, the horseshoeer, I get them shoot 150 miles away in a community that I do not belong to, that destroys the social compact, which says, we'll agree to separate out the labors for our community. Mr. Jefferson, this is a vital issue, I think. Let's continue our conversation about it when we return after a short break. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour with Humanity Scholar, Lincolnson, portraying Thomas Jefferson, and his host, Bill Crystal, a congregational minister in Reno, Nevada. Please visit our website, www.thyfinjeferson.org for more information about

Clay's upcoming performances. Thank you, and please stay tuned. We'll be back in just a moment. Thank you. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Mr. Jefferson, before we went to a break, you were essentially suggesting that

the social compact depends on doing business as close to home as one possibly can, that perhaps price isn't as important as community. I do believe that. We all have our children, and we want them educated, so we could home school all of our children, but we choose not to. One of the first grassroots institutions that we create in an Efron to your community is a school. So we decide, instead of each of us educating his own children, let's hire a schoolmaster, and we agree to pool our funds, and we realize that in doing so, we have great efficiency of scale, and that we probably get a better master than any average citizen. So we then hire a teacher, and we do the same with delivering the mail, and maintaining the streets, and taking care of sewage and a fire department, and so on. We generate a series of things we want, a series of community desirobilities. We pool our resources, we tax ourselves in order to pay for all of this, and then I don't educate my children.

I don't put out the fire in your house unless I'm part of the voluntary fire department. So that's the way communities work. It's a very simple business. It's corporate activity, but in a non-financial sense. If that's our social compact, then I have a duty to use my community's services, unless there is a profound reason to go elsewhere. But if we agree that you are the glass maker for our community, and then all of us start going somewhere else in ordering our glass from Germany, or China, or from Tampa, Florida, we put you out of business. So we've betrayed you because you only agreed to be that specialist, because you were taking that burden and doing it with greater mastery than the average would have done. We have a duty of reciprocity in a real community. What if I decide to be your glass maker, but I hire people in China to make the glass so that I can sell it to all of you at a cheap price.

I tell all of the people who are working for me they need to find jobs elsewhere, but I continue to be your glass maker. Well, that's certainly better than my going to mail order glass from somewhere else, because at least I'm still honoring the basic commitment that I have made to you. But you're not honoring the commitment made to those people who are working. That's the problem. The workers then are put out of work. We have three people who can be the leaders in the community, and you have 300 who are the workers. They deserve to have a certain dignity of labor, and they're part of the social compact, and we shouldn't disemploy them merely because something can be done cheaper elsewhere. But we should say to them, you ought to be able to compete with any other American worker. In other words, you might not be able to compete with a worker in China or Cuba, because they have systems quite different from our own. But as long as we're talking about what happens within the boundaries of America, we're going to continue to buy our glass from you, but we expect you to produce as good glass and as inexpensive glass as can be produced in X. Well, maybe I can import workers from another country then,

who will work for less money than people who live in our village. Well, there's something to that. I do believe that immigration has always been one of the great engines of American happiness and prosperity and diversity. But I think you have to be aware that you don't set a double standard. And for true citizens and one for quasi-citizens or a worker class, I think that would ruin the republic if you undertook it. Guest workers is the euphemism. I think that the Germans chose to use. I'm for open citizenship. I believe that everyone has a natural right to emigrate, and therefore everyone has a natural right to emigrate, and that the host, the receiving country really has a natural law duty to welcome new workers with the least possible probationary period. I think it should have a naturalization process that teaches newcomers how to be Americans. That is to love the Constitution and to believe in its workings and to commit themselves to the rule of law and to agree to the forms, the basic forms of a republic, to know our history to a certain degree, to know how to vote, know what representation means and why.

I think these are things we can fairly ask of a newcomer, but I don't think that we should have a very high standard for true citizens and then a very low standard for guest workers, in which there's a kind of a limbo status, where they never really become equals to us, but they do the hard work of our society. Mr. Jefferson, it seems to me that you, you are fully avoided answering the question that I ask you. Is there something wrong with a person heading a company, making thousands of times more than the people who are doing the work in that organization? Well, there may be something morally wrong, there's nothing economically wrong with it. I think that I would be unwilling to invest my funds in a company that had such a distorted hierarchy. I don't know that you can make it illegal because if I want an overseer to come to my farm in Virginia, and I put an ad in the Richmond Enquirer to get this person, and a hundred people apply and they all want to be paid $5,000 per year, I can't say I'm unwilling to pay that unless I'm willing to go without that service.

In other words, people can set their compensation level and a corporation or an individual is free to say, I can't afford that. I'm going to hire at a lower wage. That's an internal issue for the farmer or the corporation, it seems to me. I see something wrong with an overseer coming and saying, I would be happy to work for you for $5,000 per annum, but I require you to guarantee me 10 years wages if you decide to terminate our deal. Well, I would say no, but what if you were the only overseer? Then I'd have no choice, but to say yes. In other words, these are really market decisions. I'm not scandalized by these. If you are, I would say don't purchase products that were produced or distributed by that corporation. I'm not scandalized by that because I think that's the free market and I think people can make honest choices, but if there were one and only one glass maker in America and he charged $1,000 a window, I'd either have to pay them or teach somebody to make glass and believe me, I would learn how to make glass. The nice thing in my time was that the arts and crafts and the basic industrial activities of the world were simple,

and I could actually, if I wanted to, set up a nail factory or a glass factory or anything else, in other words, I had the advantage of living in a simpler time when everyone could, if necessary, produce those things at home. There's one who's read the rhetoric of the American Revolution. I think words that people largely believed, one doesn't get the sense that people were risking their lives so that a laissez-faire economic system would replace the British regime which preceded it. Well, I think there are mixed views of that. I do believe in Adam Smith, I believe in the free flow of the economy, but I do think there should be a sense of higher purpose in the souls of American citizens, and that they should make highly enlightened and responsible decisions and not give their custom to corrupt organizations, but I don't think that this necessarily has to be regulated. Now, I know that beginning in the early 20th century, with presidents like your McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and Taft and culminating in what's called the New Deal, government decided that it had no choice

but to serve as a regulator and restraining mechanism on free capitalism. I did not live in that era, but I understand that someone like Theodore Roosevelt believed that you can only have a Jeffersonian and if you adopt a Hamiltonian means to get there, that would be very upsetting to me. Thanks, Mr. Jefferson. We have another listener question. This one comes from Jeff Hensley, but it is curiously related to that which we have been discussing anyway. He said, Mr. Jefferson, what would you say about our tendency to equate capitalism and democracy in modern political debate? Well, democracy, technically speaking, is the rule of all the people. The United States is not a democracy, it has never been a democracy, and it was frankly not intended to be a democracy, the founding fathers of which I was not one, who met in Philadelphia in 1787 proposed a republic and a rather conservative republic at that. The difference between a democracy and a republic is that a democracy is the will of the people, sort of naively expressed by the people themselves meeting an assembly.

And a republic is a system in which the will of the people has a just representation, but at some detachment that the people are not directly and immediately involved in all of these decisions, they are indirectly consulted and they are involved by way of voting into office representatives from amongst themselves, and having frequent elections so that they can withdraw their support from candidates who don't serve them well, but that's different. And if you look at the Constitution, you will see many republican features that are not purely democratic. The Senate was not elected. The Senate was appointed by state legislatures, for example. The Senate serves not for two years, but for six years, so there's that removed from the will of the people. The judicial branch of government almost entirely removed from the will of the people. The electoral college, sort of a hedge between the people and their own choice for president. These are what might be called anti-democratic, but truly pro-Republican systems, and that's the kind of culture that we are.

You would have preferred a more democratic government. I don't want direct democracy, but I would have moved much closer towards real democracy, because I do believe in the sovereignty of the people, and I think that majority rule is a self-correcting mechanism, which produces very little actual corruption, and very little bad decision-making in the long run. I do believe there will be bad decisions in the direct democracy or near-direct democracy, but I think that they self-correct ideally in a kind of Newtonian manner. So I would have been more radical than most of the founding fathers, but I still wouldn't have, I don't think, proposed actual direct democracy, and it must be kept in mind that what I meant was universal white manhood suffrage, but I did not contemplate suffrage for Negroes, not even free Negroes, and I didn't contemplate suffrage for Indians or women, so that this would have been perhaps 40% of the population, or 35% of the population, if you included just white males of a minimal property base. So I can't speak as a universalist, and I know that there's some people who would consider that to be a pitiful ideal of the franchise, but my point is that we're not a real democracy, and we weren't in my time a capitalist nation.

There was what might be called the beginnings of capitalism, the rise of banks, the rise of corporations, credit systems, investments, rudimentary stock exchange, and bankruptcy procedures, and so on, but it was very rudimentary at this time, and we were still largely a self-sufficiency and barter economy. So I would have been frightened at the coming of giant capitalism, because I think that it is corrosive of republican values. In your day, I think it's fair to say that the decisions that really have the deepest influence on the lives of average Americans are not made in the Congress of the United States. They're made somewhere else by people who answer to nobody, except possibly they're stockholders. That's very different from the ideals that we had in mind in 1776 and 1787. So I think that I sense this, beginning with Colonel Hamilton's fiscal policies

as the first Secretary of Treasury, I sense that there was going to be a collision or a series of conflicts between our ideal of a republic and capitalism. These are not easy things to sort out. I don't have a naive view of this. I wouldn't be a Marxist, for example. I don't have a simple set of solutions to this problem. These are fundamental problems that are going to require the greatest creativity. And John Adams, for example, would say it's inevitable. It's inevitable that one person is going to be richer than another. Just as one woman is more beautiful than another, and one man is stronger or faster than another, and one cow is bigger than another. There is no equality, says John Adams, that there's the illusion of equality, and we can create fictional equality in the courts. But there is no actual equality, and because of that, someone is going to be more industrious or luckier or more corrupt than another person. He's going to accumulate great wealth, and he's going to have effectively more votes than an average farmer or an average tradesman. This is probably the case.

And so the question then becomes, what do you do about that? And I don't think anybody really has the answer to this. You can't let it run away because if you do, a handful of people will own the country and control it. And that's not the spirit of the thing. On the other hand, if you try to regulate it, it requires intrusive government. It takes property away from people who have earned it. It has a kind of a clogging effect on the economy. We all know that from reading Adam Smith. And so on the one hand, you have the regulated economy, which produces its own set of institutional unfairnesses, and sometimes takes the bread of labor from the pocket of the man who produced it. On the other hand, if you just have a runaway kind of Adam Smith lucky and sort of economy, in which the government plays no role in distributive justice, then you produce the conditions which led to the French Revolution. So this is the problem of culture. This is what's called moral politics or moral philosophy. And I don't think that this problem has been solved by any nation,

but it seems to me that the idea would be to enlighten the people through education and keeping them close to the soil so that they would be disposed to make decent and enlightened decisions without government regulation. We could talk about this subject endlessly, Mr. Jefferson, although I do think our listener is perhaps correct as I listen to people who are new citizens, people coming from other countries. One seldom hears them speaking of the opportunity to live in a free society, but one often hears them say they are now in a world where they have the opportunity to get as wealthy as they want workers through the dent of hard work to accumulate possessions and property that were impossible for them in the system that they leave. And one has to be delighted by that, that somebody living in squalor or degradation or oppression in Argentina or in Kuwait or what name your nation would take the enormous risk of leaving his home country

and traveling across immense distances to a new country where he has no real ties and would assimilate the new country's system and try to thrive there. There's a wonderful ideal, and I don't think we should ever despair of it. I think it's one of the things that has made the United States the magnet that it is to the world and that there's nothing despicable about economic opportunity or even prosperity in Samuel Johnson's words beyond the dreams of avarice. I don't think there's anything necessarily despicable about that. The question is, how do you distribute resources in something like an equitable manner? Let's say that there are ten of us on an island, and the island produces ten bananas. It wouldn't be right if one person has all ten or nine bananas. The other nine people have a right to live, and that can't be denied them just because somebody is luckier or more industrious than they are. And so they're in a simple little model like that. You agree that everyone has to have at least half a banana or a third of a banana

that one person might have more than others, but there has to be a sufficiency for everybody. So if on a small-scale model like that, we can agree that there has to be some restraint on runaway accumulation by the minority, then that has to have an applicability to a whole society of 200 million people. In other words, if it makes sense on your island, it also makes sense in the United States in the year 2004, and just as on the island, we would be reluctant to take the property away from our most industrious citizen. We nevertheless would do it in order to eat. So too, in an advanced urban industrial culture like yours, we may be reluctant to punish the luckiest or most industrious, or for that matter, the most corrupt of your citizens, but we may have to. We may have to redistribute basic opportunities downward in order to provide the minimal fairness without which there can be no happiness. Mr. Jefferson, I'm shocked at the degree to which you're speaking what, to me, seems like a radical language given the way in which the United States has evolved.

Where did you write some of these? Mostly to James Madison, never publicly, of course, but I said that there's a difference between primary property rights and secondary property privileges that every human being, if he's able bodied and willing to work, has a primary property right to a sufficiency of farm, as John Locke would put it, or the economic equivalency of a farm. In other words, you have a right to be well clothed, well fed, well sheltered, in a minimal way, no matter where you grow up. But if there's an abundance, then the lucky can have, and the industrious can have secondary property, but their secondary property must never be allowed to have privilege over the basic property rights of every citizen that that is primary. Thank you, sir. Indeed, I think today most people feel that they do have the right to the equivalency of a farm, thousands of dollars of debt. You just, sir, if you have a large garden, you can always feed yourself. Well, thank you, Mr. Jefferson. This is an interesting topic. We probably ought to give it more time on another program, but I do think that the whole relationship between the Republic and the accumulation of wealth is a continuing source of interest and amazement.

It's a vexing question. We'll be back in just a moment with Clay Jenkinson, who so wonderfully represents Thomas Jefferson. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour with humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson portraying Thomas Jefferson and his host Bill Crystal, a congregational minister in Reno, Nevada. The Colorado Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring an evening with the first political couple John and Abigail Adams on February 19, 2004 in Denver, Colorado. Humanity scholar and minister, Bill Crystal will portray the gregarious founding father John Adams, the second president of the United States. Mandy Dickolouy, Bill Kentucky will portray his lovely and outspoken wife, Abigail. Please visit our website, www.thyfinjeferson.org for additional information. Thank you and please stay tuned. We will be back in just a moment. Thank you. Thank you.

And welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. This is Clay Jenkinson talking, usually the voice of Thomas Jefferson, but at this point, my own voice and I'm serving as the host of this last section of the Thomas Jefferson hour. We've been talking today about banks and the Constitution and the coming of capitalism and the differences between democracy and the Republic. And Jefferson's view of whether there can be legislated or engineered social or economic equality, sitting across from me is none other than John Adams. John Adams occasionally makes an appearance on this program. President Adams, you were the second president of the United States. You watched your successor, Thomas Jefferson passed through two terms as president.

I would have liked a second term myself. Yes, I know you would have, but the people chose otherwise, but at any rate, not without a great deal of assistance from a number of people. That's certainly true. You had your enemies and they were often cruel to you. And Mr. Jefferson, may I say at times behaved in a way that was not gentlemanly with respect to you. On the other hand, he did admire you greatly and I'm sure he would want to know what you think about the problem of equality. We all can agree that equality is a great ideal in a republic. But how do you maintain equality when one person is a genius and another an imbecile when one person has leadership qualities and another person doesn't? I was always accused of being in favor of the rich in the well-born and I must say that was not any position to which I evolved. Growing up in New England, I could tell that there was always a better sort of person out and about a more industrious, hardworking, a more moral kind of person.

It was not difficult for me from my childhood to realize that equality among people is a chimera. When you hear Thomas Jefferson talking about equality in that way, in a sense what I think I hear him saying is that you can't maybe achieve absolute equality, but you can engineer something closer to equality than what happens in a runaway economy. What do you make of that? I find it amusing because I don't think Mr. Jefferson really believed in inequality. Certainly as president of the United States, he did everything in his power to stack the deck in such a way that he would always have politically the upper hand. I think as I said to Thomas Jefferson once, you're afraid of the one I am afraid of the few. You're afraid of monarchy. I'm afraid of aristocracy. I really believe that the most dangerous element in the country was the element that you feared to some degree, Alexander Hamilton, those people who would place as much power in the hands of their friends as they possibly could.

That group needed somehow to be marginalized. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that you actually said that the Senate was a useful place to put these aristocrats. I believe we should give them all sort of titles and honorifics and place them in the Senate where we could control them, where the executive branch and the more representative house would be able to keep those people under control, who otherwise would be out and about doing all sorts of dastardly things. You're saying that you can flatter the rich and the well-born into some sort of socially acceptable behavior. Well, I thought that was possible. I think Mr. Hamilton thought that you could encourage them through money. I felt that it was possible. I'm a New Englander. We're pretty thrifty. I thought we could do it in ways that were much less expensive by offering them titles and by giving them, you're going to make a house of lords. Well, not exactly, sir, but I thought, you know, I took the early Republic. I took very, very seriously.

And I thought that the titles that people in this Republic ought to convey the seriousness that I had. I was sure that the President of the United States should be known as his Highness, which you have your Senators serve for life. Well, that was one way to do it. If they were appointed by their own legislative bodies in their own given states, it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter very much. So the people will be represented in the House of Representatives and the aristocrats will... The natural aristocrats. The better sort of people. When you talk about aristocrats, you don't mean just people who are fabulously wealthy. You're not hereditary aristocrats. I'm talking about the people who will rise in any social order by dent of ability and effort. Are you a less a fair capitalist in the manner of Adam Smith? No, no, I'm not. A greatly feared capitalism one. When Alexander Hamilton proposed the National Bank, I was certain that he was out to make his own cronies rich. Adam Smith, as you know, published the Wealth of Nations in 1776.

Unless a fair is a term that means let the economy be free. Let there be a free exchange of goods and services without a great deal of government supervision or regulation. How would you regulate the economy? I think it would be a very difficult thing to do as Mr. Jefferson has suggested earlier in the program, but I do think that the government has a responsibility if, in fact, people are being deprived of that which is theirs. As Mr. Jefferson was saying, if people are being denied a part of what they have participated in producing that there is something clearly wrong. I like Jefferson would have liked to have seen an agrarian society. I was a yoman farmer. You were more of a farmer than Mr. Jefferson. My hands got dirty all of my life and I greatly, greatly enjoyed nothing more than being out in my fields. I like farming and was good at it. In fact, married a woman who was a great farm manager in the many years that I was gone. She was able to increase our holdings. She was absolutely wonderful, but I do believe that agriculture

is, in fact, a system that enables merit to be readily rewarded that the hardworking farmer. The one who gets up earliest in the morning is the most energetic will thrive. You have something of Mr. Jefferson's antagonism to the speculator classes. My son, John Quincy, convinced me that we should invest some of our profit, some of our earnings in stocks. We did so and lost it all, lost every bit of it. I believe at one point your son, John Quincy Adams, had to guarantee some loans to keep you and Abigail solvent. We lost everything as what Mr. Jefferson might call stock jogging. I was not a favor in favor or a friend of that system. It had done very little for me. When I died, my assets were property and the fruit of our labors. Do you believe that every human being has a right to a farm or its equivalent?

I'm less a student of natural law than Mr. Jefferson, but I do believe that everyone has the right, I think, has the right to work by the dent of his own effort and to thrive if he possibly can. Didn't you anticipate government ever redistributing money downward? Well, I think the redistribution in modern time is really a system of taxation. And I think we had glimpses of it in my time, but it's not anything that I would like to see. I'm less interested in activism and government than perhaps so many other people. I truly believe that the government will perform admirably that is filled with checks and balances, where each branch is actively working to stay to limit the excesses of the others. To stay the control, the excesses of others that it will work admirably, and such systems shouldn't be necessary.

I just have two more questions for you. First of all, I think everyone understands, but you did not have any slave labor on your farms. No, no slave labor whatsoever. You did have hired hands and a few hired man's and milkmaids and that sort of thing, yes, sir. And finally, when you hear Thomas Jefferson talking the way he characteristically does, and that kind of golden way about equality and natural law, and island with ten people on it in a loaf of bread or bananas, do you respect that or do you see Mr. Jefferson as naive? Well, it's wonderful to hear. It has a soothing effect when one hears it, but then I stop and remind myself that if Mr. Jefferson had the ten bananas and the other nine people on the island were slaves, that they would certainly not eat nearly as well as he was going to. But he would make a great frappe of those bananas and would perhaps design a way to make more bananas grow and would have theories of banana distribution and the genetics of bananas. I mean, Mr. Jefferson would be amazing if not quite practical.

I think those of us who lived in the north were terribly aware that people of Mr. Jefferson's class were held in the stead that they were by virtue of slave power. There was no comparison between the sort of farming that I did and the kind of thing that Mr. Jefferson was involved with. John Adams were always delighted to talk with you, and we will, of course, be talking with you much more in the future. I look forward to the moment when you and President Jefferson actually square off and have a dialogue, I hope not a debate, but a dialogue in this forum. Jefferson had a mind honey combed with ambition. What a terrible thing to say at the end of a otherwise genial interview. We've been talking to John Adams. I said it was a Krabby person. Yes, you are. To the second President of the United States, the Duke of Brain Tree. His rotundity. His rotundity. John Adams. Now I would like to introduce the scholar behind President Adams. You all know him primarily as William Crystal, the host of the Thomas Jefferson Hour, also a congregational minister, a historian of religion and ideas,

and to Chautauqua and Bill, this is fun. I mean, you must be having a great time preparing for John Adams. John Adams is an interesting sort of man. He was not interested in political theory as was Thomas Jefferson, although he certainly read everything he could about Constitution writing and in fact wrote the Constitution for the State of Massachusetts, which the system of checks and balances, which seems to have been largely carried over in the writing of the Constitution that was produced in 1787. But I think Adams loved theology, can imagine, but he truly loved theology. And I think one thing he learned, he was not a Calvinist, but he certainly was the heir to a Puritan tradition in which equality and perfectibility were just non-existent. Let's go back to that, because that's so fascinating. You just said something very intriguing that Adams was not a Calvinist, but he was an heir to the Puritan tradition. Distinguished those a little. Well, I think there was a secularized Puritanism that characterized everything about New England.

I think it influenced the government, I think it influenced the way people did business in their everyday lives, and it certainly influenced John Adams in the way he thought about the people around whom he lived. He would call himself a realist, Jefferson would call him a pessimist, where do you see him? I think, you know, it's interesting. He was a realist sometimes, and when he was a realist, he was right on. But I think he didn't have his finger on the pulse of people very often, as Thomas Jefferson also nodded. He had no sense for what people were thinking. I think his effort to create titles, appropriate to the duties of the offices of the United States government cost him every bit of capital he had with George Washington. Well, everybody else, but you know what? My friend Joanne Freeman, who's a historian of Hamilton and has written a splendid book called A Fairs of Honor about dueling in the time of Jefferson, says, you always have to take these people seriously. It's easy to laugh at John Adams when he says

we need titles of nobility, but her view is he meant it. He must have meant it. He must have had profound reasons for thinking it. He may have been ridiculed by others, but I mean, didn't he believe that we couldn't really have the majesty of the rule of law without titling? Well, the irony of John Adams is that he was considered an anglophile. I don't think he really was. I think the poor man suffered at the court of St. James. I think he was treated shabbily, but I do think he understood based on his experiences as the ambassador in Great Britain. I think he really did understand that the titling people gives you a chance to put them in a kind of pigeonhole and by pigeon-holing them, there is at least the possibility that they can be controlled. Well, you know, that still goes on in Britain. It's a good fortune to be there not so long ago, and they had the honors announcement where the people who are getting peerages having a hard time with Nick Surmick. They do this. Of course, every time you make somebody appear, you make a new friend to the regime, among other things, and you create an establishment legitimacy.

But another thing that I wanted to ask you about is I went to Stratford, and that reminded me, Stratford on Avon, reminded me that Adams and Jefferson actually went as tourists to Stratford on Avon. They were there when it was not yet very popular, and they each carved a little chip out of what was then said to be Shakespeare's chair. But they went on this kind of zany tour of the home counties of Britain, and didn't. Adams actually lecture the British about freedom. He got to a number of towns. Did he reach Boston, and they're described to the people of Boston how much their democracy was, you know, was an influence in the United States. I don't know. They went to sites from the English Civil War, and Adams would, they go into a public house, a hotel, and Adams would say, now, do you understand that this is where freedom was born, and that you owe everything to this moment in British history, and the people would say, ah, never heard of it. And that would lecture them and say, this is why Britain has become corrupt,

because you don't remember the roots of liberty that occurred in 1640 in the Battle of X or Y or Z, and I'm sure Jefferson was just cringing as Adams rebuked for the British. And yet, I have this feeling of deja vu, are there not people in our own time who tell us that we have forgotten the great moments in American history that have made us. Haven't we been... They're seldom foreigners visiting our tour sites. I just love the idea that Adams is telling the British never forget. The time about 30 years ago I was in an elevator in Washington, D.C. Hotel, and an Englishman looked at me and he said, yank, you should be ashamed of this city. Why? Your national capital? What was his claim? It was pretty seedy in those days. There was a lot of race issues that are still important in the world. And the blight, previously. The blight came awfully close to Capitol Hill. My favorite moment of all time in cross-cultural misunderstanding was when I was staying with the British family for a summer, and my friend Douglas and I were there, the father, the Potter Familia, so this family was

an official in the British military intelligence system, and he had spent some time in New Hampshire. And so we had this long talk in which they belittled the United States at every turn and said we were ignorant and stupid and the bullying and crude and materialistic and all the things that the British say. And so I turned to this man, Tony Phillips, and said, what did you like best about America when you spent time there? And he said, egg McMuffin. Bill, I love that you're doing John Adams, and you have programs you and Abigail are making appearances around the country, and you are going to come on this program, and I think you're going to do an out-of-character biography of John Adams and an in-character biography on this program soon. Well, it's good to learn. Thank you very much. You are talking with Bill Crystal, who is John Adams and the host of this program, and I am Clay Jenkins, and we'll see you next week for another exciting edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Good day.

Good day. Music for the Thomas Jefferson Hour was provided by Steven Swinford of Reno, Nevada. You can visit Mr. Jefferson's home page on the World Wide Web at www.thithenjeperson.org. Again, our website is www.thithenjeperson.org. To donate $9 and receive a copy of today's program, or to ask Mr. Jefferson a question for free, please call 1-888-4588-1803-1888-4588-4803. Thank you for listening, and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining, historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson.