Richard Posner has an interesting essay in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review about the current state of the news media. I don’t always agree with Posner, but I do agree with almost all of his argument here, and I particularly liked his defense of blogging vis-à-vis the traditional media. I sometimes get depressed at the low intellectual standards I encounter on so many blogs, but all things considered, I think Posner is right that blogs make a net positive contribution to discourse.

Joseph J. Ellis has an interesting if somewhat odd review in the same place of Harvey J. Kaye’s book, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Bizarrely titled “Founding Father of the American Left,” Ellis actually says this in the review:

Oddly enough, however, over the past 30 years Paine's chief fans have appeared within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, making Paine, like Jefferson, the proverbial man for all seasons. Though weird, and surely not the legacy Kaye has in mind, the Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich persuasion has a plausible claim on the libertarian side of the Paine legacy, which is deeply suspicious of all forms of consolidated political power and views government as ''them'' rather than ''us.'' Paul Wolfowitz would also be able to cite Paine in support of George W. Bush's Iraq policy, since Paine believed that democratic values were both universal and self-enacting. History makes strange bedfellows.

The terms “oddly” and “weird” mark the points at which Ellis’s powers of argument have essentially failed him. Paine’s views, like Jefferson’s, are a popularized version of Locke’s, and it should be obvious to anyone who has read Locke (or Louis Hartz or Robert Nozick ) why Locke, Jefferson and Paine are as much “founding fathers of the American left” as they are founders of the secular-individualist part of the American right.

Paine is sometimes described as a precursor of the left on the basis of his 1795 essay “Agrarian Justice,” which can justifiably be read as a defense of a redistributionist welfare state. But it can with equal justification be read as a defense of what Robert Nozick, in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, described as non-redistributionist"rectificatory justice." Paine describes the fund defended in “Agrarian Justice” as “compensation” for a “loss” imposed by “the introduction of the system of landed property.” That is an appeal to compensation (which is compatible with classical liberalism) not welfare rights (which isn't). (This online essay makes some interesting points to that effect , albeit from a normative perspective I reject.)

Paine's views may not be music to hard-core libertarian ears, but they shouldn't be music to the ears of contemporary egalitarians of the Rawlsian or Dworkinian sort either--much less to Marxists like G.A. Cohen . In form, I think Paine's argument offers the sort of defense of government poverty programs that a Lockean classical liberal like myself can in principle countenance or at least be fellow traveler to. And Paine makes points in the essay that are useful for thinking about the transformation of quasi-feudal economies to capitalist ones in the contemporary"Third World", e.g., Egypt, Pakistan, and India.

At any rate, this part of the classical liberal heritage is one that I think both libertarians and redistributionist liberals would do well to take a harder look at. Nozick aside, it’s unfortunate that so few have.