Thomas PAINE

Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and nothing else. Two years later, he published Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that sold 500,000 copies in a country of 2.5 million people and made the case for American independence in the clearest, most direct language anyone had yet managed.

Common Sense was followed by The American Crisis, read aloud by Washington to his troops at Valley Forge. Then by Rights of Man. Then by The Age of Reason. Then by Agrarian Justice, which proposed a sovereign wealth fund, funded by a tax on land value, that would pay every citizen a lump sum upon reaching adulthood and an annual payment in old age. We would recognize it today as a universal basic income.

He died in 1809, broke, nearly friendless, and widely reviled. Fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral. He had been too anti-slavery, too anti-monarchy, too anti-religion, and too committed to economic justice for the political class that preferred comfortable fictions.

He was also almost entirely right, which history has gradually acknowledged.