Agrarian Justice

Thomas Paine's Foundation Text for the Social Security System

“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.”
Thomas Paine
AGRARIAN JUSTICE

“In ‘Agrarian Justice,’ Thomas Paine developed the first realistic proposal in the world to abolish systematic poverty: a universal social insurance system comprising old-age pensions and disability support and universal stakeholder grants for young adults, funded by a 10% inheritance tax focused on land. He argued for a form of equality consistent with liberty. In justifying his proposal using social contract theories and John Locke’s principles of property, Paine offered a third way between proto-communism—symbolized by the French Revolution’s “Equals” radical contingent and their desire to confiscate all wealth—and England’s Poor Laws, which offered humanitarian relief but stigmatized the poor and subjected them to harsh social control and workhouse conditions. Paine defended the private property system, while also theorizing large-scale poverty as preventable injustice and conceiving of universal entitlements to limit poverty caused by property-holding inequality. Thus Paine helped forge the modern idea of distributive justice.”
Thomas Paine’s “Agrarian Justice” and the Origins of Social Insurance”
Elizabeth Anderson
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199928903.001.0001/acprof-9780199928903-chapter-3

The Social Security Administration hosts a complete copy of Paine’s AGRARIAN JUSTICE on its own website as a foundation text of the system:

https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html