Could Jefferson have been an Objectivist?
"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities." --Thomas Jefferson
Your thoughts?
Your thoughts?
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You'd be surprised at how many of the Founding Fathers died in debt; when they pledged their fortunes, they sometimes lost them.
People generally do not know that Jefferson died a debtor, and his estate was forced to sell his books (now the start of the Library of Congress) to pay off that debt.
For a while, Jefferson was actually in charge of the patent office, one of his lesser known positives.
He struggled mightily with the Louisiana Purchase. What a bargain that was, but it was an overreach of his executive power.
What Jefferson was best at was documentation of the business practice of his farming. Any accountant would be proud of that.
" was the commonly held view at that time, that the black man was different from the white man in speciation and rational attributes, and though he personally had doubts of that position, he bowed to the majority view point and profited from it. "
No, the commonly held view at that time was that black people might not even be human; that they might not have souls.
Nobody thought that "black man was different from white man in speculation and rational attributes". They thought that black people were *inferior* in speculation and rational attributes. Indeed, the common view was that they were irrational and incapable of higher reason.
I call it "temporal bigotry" because, much to my disgust, and thanks to PC indoctrination, moderns insist on applying modern culture and modern "accepted truths" as being the majority opinion throughout history. It leads to historically inaccurate absurdities like the idea that all right-thinking people just *knew* Nixon was a crook (in spite of winning in a landslide election...)
Since we want to make a hero of Jefferson, the idea that he might hold Objectivist views centuries before Rand created Objectivism has to pass the *modern* smell test of slavery being anti-Objectivist. Well, in some regards the world of that era was a lot "uglier" than ours.
So, tell me, how anti-Objectivism is it that Jefferson owned... horses? Dogs? Perhaps cattle? Now you hopefully get an idea of not the popular opinion which must be "gone along with" as would be the case in modern culture, but a flat-out mindset, *even among our would-be heroes*, 180 degrees opposite currently accepted thought.
I'll take it a step further for you... Jefferson, Washington, Adams, even Franklin, would have been appalled at our modern society, in many, many politically incorrect ways.
But, since you invoked the words "slaves" and "slavery", the Pavlovian reaction is supposed to be, "Oh, yeah, he couldn't be one of us, cause he did something we think baaaad"...
Yeah, at least Jefferson didn't murder millions of people in his arrogance and due to his social philosophy... unlike Galt.