In America there is little or no government, according to Paine. Society performs there quite naturally, with ‘order and decorum’. It follows, according to Paine, that poverty is unknown in America.18

Paine’s preoccupation with government as the source of all coercion, his conviction that civil society is the realm of true freedom, is nowhere better revealed than in his obsession with taxation. The real threat to individual freedom, for Paine, is governmental taxation. Taxation is the symbol of tyranny and corruption. His self-appointed mission was to defend ‘the cause of the poor, of the manufacturers, of the tradesmen, of the farmer, and of all those on whom the real burden of taxes fall’. Monarchy, aristocracy and taxes were all of a piece in Paine’s mind. In his anti-monarchical essay of 1792 he insisted that ‘whoever demands a king, demands an aristocracy, and thirty millions of taxes’. Royalty ‘has been invented only to obtain from man excessive taxes’. The turmoil of his revolutionary age was produced, he said, by taxpayers who had had enough. He wrote in 1792: ‘There are two distinct classes of men in the nation [England]. Those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon the taxes.… When taxation is carried to excess, it cannot fail to disunite these two, and something of this is now beginning to appear.’19

America represented for Paine ‘a revolution in the principles and practice of governments’. He meant by this its repudiation of monarchy and the hereditary principle and its commitment to representative government. In addition, America represented liberal Utopia, the triumph of civil society over government. Like Locke, who had claimed that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’, Paine contended that ‘the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world’. Paine was struck with how well revolutionary America performed with little central direction: ‘A little more than what society naturally performed was all the government that was necessary.’ American government was also cheap. Extending over a country ten times as large as England, Paine calculated its costs as ‘a fortieth part of the expense which government costs in England’. No vast patronage network here; no costly system of jobs. The civil list for the support of one man, the King of England, Paine noted, is ‘eight times greater than the whole expense of the federal government in America’. What little government there was in America was simple, local and understandable. The Americans put into practice Paine’s maxim that the ‘sum of necessary government is much less than is generally thought’. In America, ‘the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a court rioting at its expense. There taxes are few.’ In England, men were envious of America, and calls for change were coming fast, Paine wrote in 1792, because ‘the enormous expense of government has provoked men to think’.20

The triumph of civil society over government, of cheap and simple self-regulation over expensive and tyrannical taxation, is seen in a fascinating and repeated preference Paine acknowledges for local over centralized government. England, he suggests, really governs itself, with constables, assizes, magistrates and juries. This is done at virtually no expense, at no great intrusion of taxation on individual freedom. Central government, on the contrary, or ‘court government’, while useless, is a leviathan, an overblown monster spewing forth jobs and wars. It is the ‘most productive machine of taxation that was ever invented’.21 The latter, centralized monarchical government, is unnecessary and a constant threat to individual liberty. The former, self-regulation by local society, is natural, cheap and really not government at all. It is thus no threat to individual rights or to the self-realization of talented individuals.

For the liberal Paine there is but one villain: government.