Jefferson on Public Education, Pseudo-Aristocracy and State Government

Posted by Jeff Matthews

Many new-born Tenthers approach the idea that all government should be framed to operate as if the U.S. Constitution is the guide-post for a complete government.   For example, if the Constitution does not allow for public education, then, many people take from that the idea that this means our founders thought public education was bad, wasteful, etc.   This is not the case.

To understand a Republican form of government means to understand that it is comprised of different forms of government, with different purposes.   The national government is to be concerned with national affairs.   The manner and method of education is not necessarily better-served by the national government, when we have a system of state and local governments to design and operate it.  Therefore, the Constitution was intended as only a framework for a small part of our government – and not the guidepost for all government,

So let’s make no mistake about it.   This movement is not about running all our society with an extremely limited government.   It is about proper government.   Our founders knew the difference, and today’s Americans should, too.

Jefferson was a prolific writer.   He is considered the father of the Constitution, and I think, rightly so.   But often times, people envision Jefferson only through the Constitution, and then, they get the impression he was some sort of social Darwinist – where everyone is expected to get through life solely on their own labor, thrift and luck.

Jefferson was not that way at all, and he saw clearly that state and local governments needed to implement laws and public programs to insure the well-being of the Republic.   He thought them to be absolutely necessary.

Jefferson had grave reservations about how aristocracy inevitably tends to corrupt government.   I will address his thoughts by reference to excerpts in Jefferson’s letter to John Adams, dated October 28, 1813.  Jefferson wrote to Adams:

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?

Here, Jefferson is making a distinction between two classes of aristocracy.   The “natural aristocracy” is that class of persons who ascend to high status in life because they are virtuous and talented.   They are wise and capable people and do not tend to operate out of passion, bias or corruption.

Then, there is the “pseudo-aristocracy,” which is most often founded on wealth and birth.   They did not earn what they have.  They are not uniquely virtuous or wise.   They just happened by the odds of birth to be those “one in a million” babies born into vast wealth, which tends to propel them to positions of leadership and control.

In the final sentence from the quote above, Jefferson is saying that government should be designed in a manner to most effectively propel the natural aristocracy into government.   This is not because of their wealth, because even pseudo-aristocrats have wealth.  It is because of their virtue and talent.

In passages from the letter below, it can be seen that Jefferson aimed to cultivate virtue and talent, even at the public expense.  This is all about good government.

Jefferson continues to Adams:

The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent it’s ascendancy. On the question, What is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging it’s errors. You think it best to put the Pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where also they may be a protection to wealth against the Agrarian and plundering enterprises of the Majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil. For if the coordinate branches can arrest their action, so may they that of the coordinates. Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively. Of this a cabal in the Senate of the U.S. has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation to protect themselves. From 15. to 20. legislatures of our own, in action for 30. years past, have proved that no fears of an equalisation of property are to be apprehended from them.

What to do of the mischievous pseudo-aristocracy?   Adams wanted to have a separate legislature with inferior authority, presumably to placate their appetite for control without giving them too much control.

Jefferson disagreed.   He thought such a mechanism to be artificial and dangerous.   The pseudo-aristocracy, he thought, might be able to use their power and influence to turn the table of power and subordinate the power of the wisest and most capable officials.  Notably, Jefferson dispels the argument that the pseudo-aristocracy would perform a necessary role of protecting  wealth by being a buffer between the wealthy and the “plundering enterprises of a Majority of the people.”  Jefferson noted that several legislatures had convened over 30 years, and there was no evidence of plunder and equalization of property from the bottom-up.

Jefferson continued:

I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.

At the first session of our legislature after the Declaration of Independance, we passed a law abolishing entails. And this was followed by one abolishing the privilege of Primogeniture, and dividing the lands of intestates equally among all their children, or other representatives. These laws, drawn by myself, laid the axe to the root of Pseudo-aristocracy. And had another which I prepared been adopted by the legislature, our work would have been compleat. It was a Bill for the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every county into wards of 5. or 6. miles square, like your townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might recieve at the public expence a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be compleated at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and compleatly prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.

Altho’ this law has not yet been acted on but in a small and inefficient degree, it is still considered as before the legislature, with other bills of the revised code, not yet taken up, and I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government.

Now, this is where social programs and laws concerning wealth distribution come into play in Jefferson’s mind.  Jefferson thinks the election process would be just fine, provided systems are in place to educate the people, and provided further, that systems are in place to insure cross-generational re-distribution of wealth and a proper education for all citizens.  By re-distribution, I do not mean taking it and giving it away.  What I mean – and what Jefferson meant – is that re-distribution is to be accomplished by means to insure that the wealth is simply not locked-up forever.

Jefferson first notes that, in Virginia’s first legislative session, they passed a law abolishing entails.   An “entail” is a legal mechanism that locks property into a family for an indefinite number of generations by prohibiting the right of one’s descendants to dispose of it.   These were commonly used so that if your son was an idiot, he wouldn’t spoil the estate you left him.  He couldn’t sell it.  He couldn’t borrow against it.  All he could do is hold it and try to enjoy income from it.  Upon his death, it would go to your grandchild, with the same restriction.   The idea was to preserve multi-generational wealth indefinitely.

Jefferson, and obviously many enlightened founders, saw the evil in entails.   They lock up wealth and artificially suppress natural aristocracy.   For example, a middle class entrepreneur with great virtue and talent could not buy land when held in an entail (since the owner could not sell it).  This meant that an idiot would tend to be in possession of great wealth, which might otherwise be exploited properly and made productive for the benefit of society.  So, this is one form of wealth-preservation thought by our founders to be an evil worthy of legislative remedy.   For more on the corrective laws to put an end to entails, research can be done on “the rule against perpetuities.”

The next thing Jefferson did along with the Virginia legislature was to abolish primogeniture.   Under the common laws before this, the estate of a person who died intestate (without a will) was inherited by the first-born son.   This seems so unnatural to us today, but it had a purpose.   The idea of primogeniture was to maintain the size of one’s empire because dividing it also meant the influence associated with vast wealth would be divided.   Jefferson believed it was best to recycle wealth to those who were most capable of handling it with virtue.   Primogeniture was abolished in favor of an equal distribution to all children of intestates.

Notably, as to abolishing primogeniture and entails, Jefferson wrote those laws, and his express purpose was, as he said, to “la[y] the axe to the root of Pseudo-aristocracy.”  He absolutely, positively did not want people locking up their wealth forever.

Finally, Jefferson proposed a bill to establish public education in Virginia.   Education was not going to be just a “good,” as some say, but a “right.”  The purpose, under Jefferson’s bill, was to provide a basic education for all as a right.   Then, at the conclusion of the basic education, the more talented and virtuous students would be selected and given, at the public expense, a higher education.   Jefferson believed, as obviously so many of our founders did, that the purpose of government was to design – not to preserve, sit back and observe.  Again, our founders were not social Darwinists.

A good government design, according to Jefferson, does what it can to cultivate virtue and talent where it exists.   They realized, unlike many modern Americans, that “equality of opportunity” does not mean anything unless the opportunity is realistically there.   When wealth is locked up among the aristocracy and remains locked up in the pseudo-aristocracy (for generations and generations), opportunities wane, and corruption and incompetence abounds.

Therefore, we have public education as a right.   Jefferson knew that waste comes with all public institutions.   But, in his opinion, the waste from it was outweighed by the benefits to society.   In fact, it was considered perhaps one of the most important things needed to sustain the principles of our founding.   As he said about his bill for public education as a right:   “I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government.”   The reason, in Jefferson’s own words:  “Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and compleatly prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.”

So, there it is.  A function of good government is to destroy the evil associated with the incompetence and corruption of wealthy pseudo-aristocrats.   Government must tax and spend to cultivate competition with that class of people in order to “defeat the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts (i.e., public offices).”

If our goal is to have a meritocracy (where those who are best for our society rise to the top), then, we need to focus on talent and virtue.   As can be seen from Jefferson’s writing, property rights and freedom from taxation were not his only concerns.

In summary, Jefferson did not take the position that property rights are forever inviolate and the government’s purpose was to forever protect those rights.  Jefferson sought to provide a reasonable, yet limited, protection of property rights.   While a person might think Jefferson, as the champion of property rights, would have agreed that a person should be able to do anything they please with their property, that person would be wrong.  Jefferson actually wrote the laws to make sure this would not happen.

Likewise, Jefferson did support public education, even though, in many cases, it will be wasted by those who don’t aspire to excellence.  He thought our rights to be free from taxation should be limited, but not to the extent that we do not support and install public institutions to cultivate virtue and talent in order to find and nurture our natural aristocrats and to minimize the harm which is caused by perpetual holdings of wealth in the hands of pseudo-aristocrats.

In other words, the idea of social Darwinism was repugnant to Jefferson.  He believed it to be a vital role of government (local) to develop talent from all classes where it exists and to use public funding to do it.

The Constitution is extremely important as a framework for certain governmental operations at the national level.   But, we should make no mistake about it.  The Constitution was designed to perform a small function of government.   We should not judge state and local governments against the limited role of the federal government provided in the Constitution.   These governments have completely different purposes.  As I am sure Jefferson would, I strongly advocate the Tenther movement, but I do not gauge all government by the Constitution.   I gauge the federal government by this standard.

Jeff Matthews is an attorney living in Houston, Texas. His current projects include the website SovereignStates, and the forthcoming organization, The National Taxpayer Takeover.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 1:01 pm. It is filed under From the State Chapter, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.