Concerning the last question about progressive estate taxes and subdividing property...?

Question

Thomas Jefferson believed in all of the above. Progressive estate taxes, public schools, and "subdividing property."

However, whenever I bring him up as a liberal, cons will say no, he's a "classical liberal", aka liberterian.

Nobody who answerd my question agreed with that. They said that person would be a modern liberal, beyond that, or even a socialist.

NOW FOR SOME INTERESTING QUOTES

JEFFERSON ON PROGRESSIVE ESTATE TAXES AND SUBDIVIDING PROPERTY

"The property of this country is absolutely concentred in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards... I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on."

--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28,1785. ME 19:17, Papers 8:682
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=967

JEFFERSON ON TAXING ONLY THE RICH IF POSSIBLE

"We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations, because it falls exclusively on the rich, and with the equal partition of intestate's estates, constitutes the best agrarian law.. Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., and the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spare a cent from his earnings."
--Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811. ME 13:41
http://www.constitution.org/tj/jeff13.txt

JEFFERSON ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393

"The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, 1817. ME 15:156
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1370.htm

Answer 1

Taxes are the lifeblood of the government. There will be no country if there are no taxes. The power to tax is even the power to destroy in some instances.