First Letter from Tim Ferguson to Peter Georgescu, October 2024

[i] See Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality, The New York Times, August 7, 2015, and Capitalists Arise!: End Economic Inequality, Grow the Middle Class, Heal the Nation (with David Dorsey). Berrett-Koehler, May 1, 2017.

[ii] On the Founders’ middle-class centric economic philosophy, see, e.g., John Adams, Dissertation, 1765: “Property monopolized, or in the Possession of a Few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches,” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785: “Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” James Madison, Parties, 1792, advocating measures to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort” and Noah Webster, Miscellaneous Remarks on Divizions of Property … in the United States, 1790: “The basis of a democratic and a republican form of government, is, a fundamental law, favoring … a general distribution of property.” Alexander Hamilton similarly asserted: “While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community; the tendency of the people’s suffrages, will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.” 21 June 1788, New York Ratifying Convention. That the founding generation understood that America was born middle class, and that it was those middling origins which enabled the Founding Fathers to establish the United States as a democratic-republic during an age of aristocracy and monarchy, see, e.g. see remarks from British Colonel Lord Adam Gordon in 1764: “The levelling principle here, everywhere operates strongly and takes the lead, and everybody has property here, and everybody knows it,” Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751: “6. Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short Time save Money enough to purchase a Piece of new Land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family; such are not afraid to marry; for if they even look far enough forward to consider how their Children when grown up are to be provided for, they see that more Land is to be had at Rates equally easy, all Circumstances considered. 7. Hence Marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe,” Richard Price, Observations on Civil Liberty, 1776, stating that “The Colonies consist only of a body of Yeomanry supported by agriculture, and all independent, and nearly upon a level; in consequence of which, joined to a boundless extent of country, the means of subsistence are procured without difficulty,” Thomas Pownall, A memorial address to the sovereigns of America, 1783, stating that America was characterized by “a general equality, not only in the Persons, but in the power of the landed Property of the Inhabitants” and that America stands on a “natural equal level Basis,” Charles Pinckney, speech of 25 June 1787, stating: “The people of the U. S. are perhaps the most singular of any we are acquainted with.—Among them there are fewer distinctions of fortune & less of rank; than among the inhabitants of any other nation.—Every freeman has a right to the same protection & security and a very moderate share of property entitles them to the possession of all the honors & privileges the public can bestow.—Hence arises a greater equality, than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue. … there will be few poor & few dependent,” George Washington to Richard Henderson, 1788: “America … will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons … possessed of a moderate capital, to inhabit. … it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people because of … the facility of procuring the means of subsistence.” For confirmation by contemporaneous observers, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” For confirmation by modern researchers, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Incomes 1774-1860, NBER Working Paper 18396, 2012, showing that in 1774, New England and the Middle Colonies were the most egalitarian place in the measurable world. That the Founders would have advocated positive interventions, including wealth caps, as necessary to preserve the United States as a middle-class democratic republic, see, e.g., John Adams to Abigail Adams, 25 August 1776, on Tiberius Gracchus reviving “the old Project of an equal Division of the conquered Lands, (a genuine republican Measure, tho it had been too long neglected to be then practicable).” The Lex Sempronia Agraria revised the Lex Licinia-Sextia, imposing hard caps on private use of public lands. Adams was influenced by James Harrington, who advocated an agrarian law to balance the nobility with the commoners, capping landholdings at £2,000 annual revenues. See also John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, advocating measures “to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates.” See also Noah Webster’s favorable account of Gracchus: “Rome, with the name of a republic, was several ages losing the spirit and principle. The Gracchi endeavored to check the growing evil by an agrarian law; but were not successful.” Id. Thomas Jefferson’s actions are also particularly instructive. See the first three drafts of Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 Virginia constitution, reviewed by James Madison, establishing a conditional 50-acre viritim (land grant) to every eligible adult male citizen. Read this measure especially in conjunction with his 1776 law to abolish entails and 1785 law to abolish primogeniture in Virginia, by which, he announced to John Adams, he “laid the axe to the root of Pseudoaristocracy.” Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1813. Other states also abolished entails and primogeniture in an effort to avert wealth concentration.

[iii] See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton 2018. His research shows that structural inequality has only been reduced by the shocks of plague, revolution, mass-mobilization warfare, or state collapse. While many states have deployed various palliatives and sedatives to the problem of wealth concentration (e.g. the Lex Thoria, Cura Annonae, Zakat, old-age pensions and subsidies in the Han Dynasty) no political society has ever implemented a corrective. Operation Abigail is intended as such.

[iv] Or at least, the Founding Father who manifests the strongest and deepest cords between the United States and Classical Antiquity. The final deliverables of Greek political thought are united in Polybius’s account of the Roman Constitution circa the Second Punic War (Polybius, Histories, Bk. VI). These intellectual deliverables, weaving together an anthropology of legislative precedent and political thought that passes through or incorporates elements from Lycurgus, Pindar, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and possibly Panaetius, Dicaerchus, Isocrates, Protagoras, and Hecataeus, are expressed through the metaphorical device of the wheel (Anacyclosis, or the constitution/revolution cycle) and the brake (the tripartite mixed constitution). In an unpublished 1763 essay entitled An Essay on Man’s Lust for Power: All Men would be Tyrants if they could, Adams described the Polybian constitution sequence and the idea of the mixed constitution, which he later (in 1807) annotated, describing these Polybian concepts as “the Creed of my whole Life.” Though he was serving as America’s first Ambassador to King George III during the Constitutional Convention, John Adams influenced American constitutional thought, communicating these Polybian precepts in the process, in at least two ways. The first was in drafting the 1780 Massachusetts constitution which established a tripartite structure and a relatively strong executive. His Massachusetts constitution, which even today remains in effect, was referenced at the 1787 Philadelphia convention. Inasmuch as the federal Constitution was an amalgamation of contemporaneous state best practices plus a strong executive (for this idea, see, e.g., remarks by Akhil Reed Amar at the 25^th annual James Madison Lecture (Was James Madison Truly Father of the Constitution?)), Adams exerted an indirect influence through his drafting. But he also exerted a direct philosophical influence on the delegates at the Philadelphia convention, directly importing Polybian concepts. In volume I of his 1787 treatise Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, in which he among other things evaluated the republics of Rome, Carthage, Sparta, Athens, Achaia, Crete, Corinth, Argos, Thebes, Crotone, Sybaris, and Locris, and the writings of Plato, Polybius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, John Adams acclaimed Polybius the mainspring of American constitutional theory: “I wish to assemble together the opinions and reasonings of philosophers, politicians, and historians, who have taken the most extensive views of men and societies, whole characters are deservedly revered, and whose writings were in the contemplation of those who framed the American constitutions. It will not be contested, that all these characters are united in Polybius.” Benjamin Rush confirms its influence upon the delegates: See letter from Benjamin Rush to John Brown Cutting, 18 May 1787, stating: “The principles & facts contained in this excellent publication have already had an influence in our Country, & from thier arriving at the time of the setting of our fæderal convention, it is expected they will be very useful in establishing such a fæderal Goverment as Mr Adams has proved to be most safe—most free, and most durable in all countries.” and a letter from Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, 2 June 1787, stating: “Mr. Adams’s book has diffused such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compounded federal legislature. Our illustrious minister in this gift to his country has done us more service than if he had obtained alliances for us with all the nations of Europe.”