Thank you, Logan, for your review of my book. I'd like to think that TJ continues to have something to say to us about freedom and democracy.

I'm both a libertarian and a populist. Sometimes those roles clash but usually they don't. I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian who worships at the altar of the Invisible Hand of the marketplace. I don't glorify greed because I recognize it as a sin. I don't care whether greed produces efficiency or "success," it's still something to be avoided. Jefferson believed in free enterprise but he objected to monopoly, whether private or public. Some libertarians of our day speak as though wealth is an end in itself and freedom is just a means toward that ultimate goal. They gush about the private sector and in their minds unfettered business always knows best. That may coincide with the views of Ayn Rand, but it contradicts the teachings of Jesus and was not the philosophy of Jefferson. Life is not found in an abundance of possessions and liberty goes beyond the ability to accumulate dollars. It's significant that Jefferson changed Locke's trinity from "life, liberty, and property" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Jefferson, of course, lived a comfortable life with abundant possessions (including slaves, to his discredit). He was not against private property but he knew that there were deeper and more important aspects to life.

Laissez-faire is not synonymous with capitalism. You can have the one without the other. Arguably, the strongest capitalist states have been those of the fascist variety in which government power and business power are openly joined in partnership (i.e., state capitalism). Such examples are obviously not libertarian or laissez-faire. Jefferson objected to incipient capitalism with its government charters and aristocracy of paper. It was founded on special privilege from the get-go, and the classical western tradition, both pagan and Christian, rejected usury.

At the same time, neither Jefferson nor his philosophical heir William Jennings Bryan believed in state socialism. Their type of liberalism was not the welfare state, big brother liberalism of the New Deal and beyond. Bryan cited Adam Smith in defense of a graduated income tax: "Is there any rule by which we can determine in what proportion people should pay taxes? Adam Smith suggested a rule a century ago but it is so just that it must have been thought of long before he was born. The rule is that citizens should contribute to the support of their government in exact proportion to the benefits received by them from their government." Bryan believed in private property and individual initiative. He also believed in justice and commonwealth.

Bryan addressed the tendency that eventually flourished as state socialism under Lenin and his heirs, and also as statism under FDR and his heirs, and he was not favorably disposed toward government by centralized bureaucracy. In 1906, he wrote, “Probably the nearest approach that we have to the socialistic state to-day is to be found in the civil service. If the civil service develops more unselfishness and more altruistic devotion to the general welfare than private employment does, the fact is yet to be discovered....A life position in the government service, which separates one from the lot of the average producer of wealth, has given no extraordinary stimulus to higher development.” Bryan went on to praise the embattled ideal of individualism, noting, “The trust magnates and the [state] socialists unite in declaring monopoly to be an economic development, the former hoping to retain the fruits of monopoly in private hands, the latter expecting the ultimate appropriation of the benefits of monopoly by the government.”

As I was rushing to return the final manuscript to the copy editor, I added some last-minute words about modern Jeffersonians and their view of the interplay between politics and economics:

"Speaking of economic justice, it should be noted that most Jeffersonians seek fairness when it comes to economics--not government-mandated economic equality. Opponents of monopoly and special privilege, their emphasis is on equal opportunity. They do not want governments dispensing unfair advantage to wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to purchase political influence. Free enterprise is an enemy of monopoly capitalism because the latter relies on government favor, eliminates competition, and reduces consumer choice. Historically, Jeffersonians do not support 'class legislation' or redistribution of wealth. These are big-government ideas (state socialism and state capitalism). Instead of statism and artificial economic leveling through coercion, Jeffersonians tend to support equal opportunity through government neutrality in the marketplace, with occasional use of anti-trust, pro-competition action to prevent monopoly. They do not worship a golden calf of economic theory, hold corporate 'persons' above real persons, or serve Mammon instead of God. At the same time, they are not welfare statists, social engineers, or devotees of paternalistic governance. Neither materialists who coldly follow economic abstractions and embrace consumerism run amok, nor sentimentalists who naively look to government for benevolence from cradle to grave, most Jeffersonians try to practice spirituality and humanism in the best sense of the words." (chapter 11, Where Did the Party Go?)

-- Jeff
see also: http://www.popcorn78.blogspot.com