Paine was moved to write
Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2025 10:40 am
Ultimately, we are faced with a work that has not only disrupted the art market, but has posed a fundamental question: who is the artist? Who really creates? And, above all, can we still talk about “creation” when the hand that paints is no longer human?
Yet, who can say.ritish scholar Thomas Paine , considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, was one of the first people to advocate for what we now call universal basic income.
Today, many of the arguments for basic income focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness; Thomas Paine, in his 1797 book Agrarian Justice, offered a rights-based approach to justifying basic special lead income. Both Paine’s arguments and his historical context reveal his views on the topic and its revolutionary potential to change the way we administer welfare.
Agrarian Justice as a reaction to two popular but opposing views on how to deal with poverty, articulated by Richard Watson and Francois Noel Babeuf . Paine thought both approaches were ineffective, so he set out his own vision of how he believed poverty could be eradicated.
Agrarian Justice begins with Paine arguing that poverty is not a natural state of life but is actually caused by man. Paine believed that the natural state of man was something like what he imagined the Native American way of life to be. The first people were hunter-gatherers who had no real need for private property as a concept. In these early human societies, no one is particularly rich, but no one is particularly poor. The crushing poverty that Paine observed could only be found in “civilized life ,” where “the richest and the most miserable of the human race are to be found .” But why is this so? Paine answers that “the main cause lies in the concept of private property.”
Yet, who can say.ritish scholar Thomas Paine , considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, was one of the first people to advocate for what we now call universal basic income.
Today, many of the arguments for basic income focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness; Thomas Paine, in his 1797 book Agrarian Justice, offered a rights-based approach to justifying basic special lead income. Both Paine’s arguments and his historical context reveal his views on the topic and its revolutionary potential to change the way we administer welfare.
Agrarian Justice as a reaction to two popular but opposing views on how to deal with poverty, articulated by Richard Watson and Francois Noel Babeuf . Paine thought both approaches were ineffective, so he set out his own vision of how he believed poverty could be eradicated.
Agrarian Justice begins with Paine arguing that poverty is not a natural state of life but is actually caused by man. Paine believed that the natural state of man was something like what he imagined the Native American way of life to be. The first people were hunter-gatherers who had no real need for private property as a concept. In these early human societies, no one is particularly rich, but no one is particularly poor. The crushing poverty that Paine observed could only be found in “civilized life ,” where “the richest and the most miserable of the human race are to be found .” But why is this so? Paine answers that “the main cause lies in the concept of private property.”