Here the principle of contribution, as taken between man and man, is reprobated as null, and destructive to equality,--and as pernicious, too, because it leads to the establishment of an aristocracy of the rich.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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The relation with regard to the contributions is without doubt null, (say they,) when the question is on the balance of the political rights as between individual and individual; without which personal equality would be destroyed, and an…
When they come to their third basis, that of Contribution, we find that they have more completely lost sight of the rights of men.
Each head, on this system, would have its vote, and every man would vote directly for the person who was to represent him in the legislature.
Men, with them, are strictly equal, and are entitled to equal rights in their own government.
I think all this might be curiously exemplified in the British Constitution.
From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.
To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy.
The arrogance of their pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an inquiry into their foundation.
In the vastness of their promises and the confidence of their predictions they far outdo all the boasting of empirics.
But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment.
They make this difference, because in their desire of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in earnest; there they travel in the beaten road.
They never depart an iota from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation.
They follow precedents and examples with the punctilious exactness of a pleader.
Trace them through all their artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all that is new.
Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most common arts.
In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly proceeds upon principles the most opposite from those which appear to direct them in the use of it.
We have their own word for it that they have made a revolution.
The most considerable of their acts have not been done by great majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will consider reasons as well as resolutions.
They have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions, as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority.
They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state.
They have assumed another of a very different nature, and have completely altered and inverted all the relations in which they originally stood.
No excess is good, and therefore too great a proportion of landed property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem to me of material injury to any common wealth that there should exist some estates that have a chance of being…
Is it better that estates should be held by those who have no duty than by those who have one? by those whose character and destination point to virtues than by those who have no rule and direction in the expenditure of their estates but…
Why, through the violation of all property, through an outrage upon every principle of liberty, forcibly carry them from the better to the worse?
Politicians like Edmund Burke
