What Would Jefferson Do?...Dissent Magazine

Dissent Magazine - What Would Jefferson Do? How Limited Government Got Turned Upside Down

Surveying the wreckage of the Great Depression,
Roosevelt simply told his followers that “the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man,” because “[a] small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”

Roosevelt’s analysis of “economic tyranny” shared a critical assumption with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and other important founders of our country: that limited government is not an end itself, but the instrument of a particular vision of society, an egalitarian vision. It was a social vision in which extremes of wealth and poverty did not exist, and a relatively equal distribution of productive property secured independence and freedom for the whole citizenry.

As historian James L. Huston writes, it was against the “political economy of aristocracy,” government organized by and for a small, wealthy elite, that supporters of the American revolution embraced the “egalitarian promise of the negative state.” The ideal, simply, was a system that restricted the legal and political power of the wealthy, in order to prevent them from combining against independent smallholders and those without property. Limited government, in other words, was a “populist” ideal, a doctrine of the many versus the few. As a group of North Carolina democrats petitioned in 1776, when “fixing the fundamental principles of Government,” the goal should be to “oppose everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich and chief men exercised to the oppression of the poor.”
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Clearly, for Jefferson and Madison (as for Taylor), the republican social objective of securing a relatively equal distribution of productive property was paramount in their thinking about what government should or should not do.
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