Raising the Minimum Wage is good, but a Basic Income would be better.

[reformist2]

4. I agree. Thomas Paine tied it to everyone's inherent right to own land. Not to buy land - to own it.

In other words, Paine thought of every citizen as a landlord to some extent, and that those who "legally" owned the land actually owed a kind of rental payment to those who did not.

An excerpt from the Wikipedia page about his pamphlet from 1795 called "Agrarian Justice":

"The work is based on the contention that in the state of nature, "the earth, in its natural uncultivated state... was the common property of the human race"; the concept of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, since it was impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. Thus Paine views private property as necessary, but that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their "payment" to non-property holders for the right to hold private property."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice