In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by exactly that: the political power of concentrated money.
"In all the governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers," he said, "the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich."
Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn't end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that only the House of Representatives -- the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that -- should have the power to raise taxes or spend federal funds.
"The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution," he said in his speech. "Liberty, not less than justice, pleads for the policy here recommended.
"If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich]" he warned, the American citizenry will "become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and dependence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first, by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption."
And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes or spend money.
In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson noted, "It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor."
Fighting those instincts of human nature, he argued, was at the core of the American experiment. (Like George Washington and many of his peers, Jefferson died broke. America's first millionaire came along in 1791 -- a shipping magnate -- and none of the founders or framers were wealthy enough to leave an estate that lasted even to a second generation.)
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, "I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependance (sic) for continued freedom."
He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that is run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America's working people "must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;" and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."
One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since Reagan.
And they're using voting suppression to maintain a situation that's so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan's election in 1980.
Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, noted that, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case."
If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.
Those are our options.
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