Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

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Review by Thom Hartmann

Some people think that FDR invented the progressive income tax when he raised income tax rates on the super-rich to 90 percent. Some believe that LBJ invented anti-poverty programs when he more than cut in half severe poverty in the US by introducing Medicare, housing assistance, and food-stamp programs in the 1960s. Some believe that Jack Kennedy was the first president to seriously talk about international disarmament, a conversation that Richard Nixon carried on in pushing through and getting ratified the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty so recently discarded by George Bush Jr. Some believe that Teddy Roosevelt - the Republican Roosevelt - was the first to seriously discuss the "living wage," or ways that corporate "maximum wage" wink-and-nod agreements could be broken up. Some believe the inheritance tax to prevent family empires from taking over our nation was the idea of Woodrow Wilson, or that FDR was the first to think up old-age pensions as part of a social safety net known today as Social Security.

But it was actually Thomas Paine who first developed all these themes in their modern political context. He did so in his book "The Rights of Man."

Thomas Edison is largely responsible for our knowledge today of Thomas Paine and his writings. In July of 1925, Edison rescued Paine from the dustbin of historic obscurity, when he wrote a widely-read plea to return Paine to our schools:

"Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.

More here: http://www.buzzflash.com/hartmann/05/05/har05005.html

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1. Tom Paine quotes

There are many Tom Paine quotes here- http://tinyurl.com/dlroj

My favorite Paine quote is "Time makes more converts than reason."