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1. As we enter into a phase of American politics where we'll be talking more about economic fairness, it's important to recognize that this is a conversation with very deep roots in American history, stretching back to the founding era. There's nothing "un-American" about it.
2. In Chapter 4 of this book, I explored the 1790s chapter of that conversation when a cohort of American democrats, inspired by the French Revolution, began to develop a substantial body of democratic (or, anti-aristocratic) economic thought. books.google.com/books?id=oRgIW…
3. The French Revolution inspired its American supporters to see the present as a uniquely propitious moment in which ordinary citizens could use the mechanisms of their newly founded government to foster a more just and egalitarian society.
4. Visions of economic fairness had long been a part of North American popular culture, but now the French example pushed many non-elite citizens to reimagine themselves as part of a newly empowered populace that could translate hopes of economic equity into reality.
5. As American democrats watched European events unfold in the 1790s, they became increasingly aware that truly egalitarian societies would not naturally and inevitably emerge once aristocracy and monarchy disappeared...
6. ...because the power that flowed from inherited, entrenched, and protected wealth was not easily dismantled. [That insight has certainly been borne out over the past two centuries, as evidenced by that Piketty chart.]
7. These democrats moved toward an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the systemic relationship between economic & political power, interpreting their new nation’s emerging forms of land speculation and finance capitalism as updated versions of old aristocratic privilege.
8. As this trans-Atlantic community of democrats pondered how best to pursue the goal of economic fairness under the new conditions of commercial capitalism, they proposed a wide range of pragmatic policies designed to translate the ideal of economic justice into a reality.
9. These 1790s democrats were not Marxists (Marx was still about 20 years away from even being born), but they did believe that a rough degree of economic equality was an essential feature of any democratic society.
10. Most of the folks I talk about in that chapter aren't household names (with the exception of Thomas Paine). One of the most interesting but little known economic thinkers of the 1790s, IMHO, is Robert Coram who I also discuss in a chapter of this book. books.google.com/books?id=QEzaL…
11. Needless to say, the 21st century is very different from the 1790s. It's not like these 18th century ideas can just be imported into our present. And it's important to note that this 1790s economic idealism bore little political fruit at the time.
12. But the key point is this...as long as America has existed as a polity, there have been significant numbers of Americans who have thought it is the government's role to foster economic equity. What counts as "equity," of course, is where things get tricky.
13. That said, I think this chart shows pretty clearly that America’s economy is becoming ever more like an aristocracy, and it’s past time that we start bending the curve in the other direction. 
14. Even if your vision of economic fairness is a simple meritocracy, then you should support higher estate taxes (what Republicans call “death taxes”) and increasing the top tax rate in order to reverse the prevailing, anti-democratic trends.
15. Inherited wealth is economic aristocracy, pure and simple. That's why people like Paine advocated progressive taxation systems (and estate taxes) that would work to democratize wealth.
16. And it's important to note that this 1790s conversation about economic equity was not about punishing the rich minority, it was about empowering the not-rich majority. Paine and his ilk were idealists.
17. And it's also crucial to note that these 18th century white men (and they were all white men) understood economic equity as something that existed only between male-headed, patriarchal households...
18. ...and that their agrarian vision of equity depended upon the acquisition of lands to the west occupied in the 1790s by Native American nations. For these two (and many more) reasons, we can't just import these 1790s ideas into our present moment whole cloth.
19. These caveats don't negate their historically-specific efforts to imagine a more economically just society...they just remind us that all political visions are time-bound and imperfect...and still worth pursuing.
20. For those wondering why these 1790s ideas never bore fruit...here's my attempt to explain it in the conclusion to that chapter--judicial review and the mythos of "the free market." Obviously, there's much more nuance that could be brought to this.
