As I See It: Jefferson, Jesus and Marx — America’s founding fathers and ‘socialists’ all!

Jon Huer

Jon Huer

By JON HUER

Published: 06-27-2025 1:32 PM

With our Independence Day coming up, let’s take stock: Indeed, what kind of America are we celebrating?

To get it started, let’s refer to a recent, unassuming article in the Recorder’s sports section, which says: The Red Sox offered Alex Bregman, a home run specialist, $120 million to play for three years.

How much is $120 million? It would take 2,000 years — yes, 2,000 years — for an average working American to reach that money. If you started working at your current salary when Jesus was a baby, by now you might be close to making that amount. Over 100 generations of continuous work, which a baseball player — a player! — makes in just 3 years! He hit 26 home runs last year (2024), which means, taking that as his HR average, he makes over $1.5 million for each of his home runs (calculated from his new Red Sox salary)!

Each cracking sound off his bat potentially sends one-and-a-half million dollars to his bank account. What the man earns with one swing of his bat takes an average American 25 years of sweat, toil and humiliation!

If such simple everyday deals among the rich don’t jolt you out of your political slumber, or force you to consider an alternative to capitalism, you have no right to breathe. Sadly, for most Americans, such a capitalist deal is nothing special, as they are commonplace events among high-end money-mongers, including Bill Gates who makes $1,000 every four seconds. That is the essence of America on our coming Independence Day.

If you are not shaken into a rage to pick up your pitchfork and storm the Wall Street barricade, our founding fathers are surely outraged, denouncing their descendants, namely, you, for betraying their creed. Why?

Because they were all “socialists” and their national system was what would today be called “socialist,” although the term was unknown to them. It is what they believed and created for the New World which is unmistakably socialist. The United States as a socialist nation and its economic system as socialism? Yes, yes to both questions. This historical fact requires a reiteration.

America’s original foundation in Jeffersonian Liberalism (technically called “Classic Liberalism”) was the reason to call America “The Shining City on a Hill.” Jeffersonian Classic Liberalism was the prototype socialism as it held our economic equality as central to America’s original principle: As a simple definition, if you believe in equality you are a socialist. In this Jeffersonian liberalism, each person’s own honest labor and rational life, without vanity or waste, constituted his whole well-being, his community and, ultimately, his nationhood and humanity.

By nature, since everyone’s working ability is close to equal, we have a perfectly equal economic system as a result. One could be equal to everyone else just by working as diligently as his neighbors. In this system where everyone works and collects what his work brings in, the perfect system of freedom and equality is the logical and inevitable result.

In this self-balancing “division of labor,” as Adam Smith explained, Jefferson’s liberalism and Adam Smith’s political economy (now shape-shifted as capitalism) met in perfect harmony: In it, everyone worked and exchanged their products at the marketplace, and their demand was met by everyone’s supply. This “socialism” was so simple and basic that the founders were busy only with the political form for the New Nation, almost never mentioning the economic. They certainly could not have imagined that someday their free and equal Americans would become virtual slaves to corporate oligarchs.

They didn’t even need to adopt Christianity as their religion since their creed of equality in labor was already in complete accord with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Both Americans and Christians believed in the honest-day’s-labor-for-honest-day’s-bread principle of Jesus’ teachings, which condemned “love of money” to mortal sin and abomination.

Karl Marx, the future founder of socialism, in essential agreement with Jefferson and Jesus, believed that humanity could not be free and equal unless it is economically free and equal. Indeed, which founders would have disagreed? The new nation of America was so “socialist” that Marx called the new Garden of Eden “an exception” to history’s continuous conflicts between haves and have-nots. Thus, all frontier Americans were born essentially “Marxist” as were the followers of Jesus.

As doctrines go, there is not much difference among Jeffersonian liberalism, Marxist socialism and Jesus’ teachings. If you were frontier Americans, you were “Marxist,” “Christian” and “socialist” at birth (although the term “socialism” took another hundred years to emerge), the most ideal combination of virtues.

As believers of Jeffersonian liberalism and Marxist socialism, if the United States and the Soviet Union kept true to their respective creeds, the two nations would have been very similar in freedom and equality. Jeffersonian liberals and Soviet socialists were virtual political-economic twins.

Of course, winner-take-all capitalist control eventually came and, with its trademark inequality, injustice and inhumanity, destroyed both Jeffersonian democracy with corporate capitalism and Soviet socialism in the Cold War. Likewise, our bedrock belief in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s bread was also replaced by the reality of the poor laboring all the days of their lives and the rich only playing on the backs of the laboring poor.

Capitalists argue that competition is human nature. But we also notice that children with plenty of toys all around them don’t claim exclusive ownership. Nor do adults — like those with abundant land in frontier America — begrudge sharing their abundance.

On my part, I have only 1,950 years of labor and toil to catch up with one baseball player’s income.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.