With the growth of agriculture, land no longer belonged to everyone but to a select few who created a monopoly on land that deprived the rest of the population of their natural inheritance of the land. During this time, powerful aristocracies in Europe owned enormous amounts of wealth and property, which they received either through inheritance or from the state. Through private land ownership, ownership passed down from generation to generation made a few extremely wealthy; meanwhile, a much larger and much less fortunate group was deprived of the right to own property that was claimed and monopolized by a select few.
If Paine is right and civilization is telegram data causing some sort of unprecedented systemic poverty among Native Americans, the solution seems pretty obvious: abandon civilization and return to being hunter-gatherers in the woods. Even if for some reason people had wanted to pursue this approach, it would have been impossible. In 1797, the earth was too populous to be supported by hunting alone, which requires vast tracts of land for even the smallest populations. “ We cannot return to the state of nature,” because as Paine explained, “It is always possible to pass from the natural state to the civilized, but it is never possible to pass from the civilized state to the natural.” Civilization is here to stay, like it or not. The right course of action is therefore to “remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen” from humanity’s transition to civilization.
he said that the earth was given in common to mankind and that “every person born into the world is born the rightful owner of some kind of property.” But he had no intention of abolishing private property and replacing it with some form of common property. Improvements made to the earth rightfully belong to those who now own private land. Paine instead wanted to “give to every person his rightfully deserved inheritance.”