It has been famously argued that Tom Paine was not much of an economic thinker. Indeed, in his published work, we see relatively scarce systematic commentary on the subject. But, as befitting his origins in a mercantile family, Paine as a young man had prepared for a career as an excise officer. He later fully participated in a broader Enlightenment conversation about the new world of credit, trade, commercial and monetary policies, among other fiscal issues of early globalization. In particular, Paine formulated a systematic critique of public debt as a compelling way to discuss political sovereignty, the social contract, and the true wealth of nations – among other issues. In 1796, in France, Paine published a critique of wartime funding of the British economy with the publication of The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance inspired by the title of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Paine’s denunciation of the economic self-mutilation caused by British wartime expansionism focused on a reform by the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, who partially privatized the public debt of Britain. The British pound sterling was henceforth sustained by mysterious private loans whose very terms were obscured from public opinion. This article argues that the pamphlet had many parallels to David Hume’s 1752 essay Of Public Debt which Hume revised after the Seven Years War with a radical critique of public debt. The Humean origins of many of Paine’s arguments are manifest in the corrupting nature of public debt tied to military expenditure. To Hume and Paine, gimmicky forms of state borrowing in times of war lead to the bankruptcy of expansionist absolutism and to the eventual “decline and fall” of belligerent empires.

中文翻译：

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潘恩欠休谟的债？

众所周知，汤姆·潘恩 (Tom Paine) 并不是一位经济思想家。事实上，在他发表的作品中，我们看到相对稀少的关于这个主题的系统评论。但是，由于出身于一个商人家庭，Paine 年轻时已经准备好从事消费税官员的职业。后来，他全面参与了更​​广泛的启蒙对话，内容涉及信贷、贸易、商业和货币政策的新世界，以及早期全球化的其他财政问题。特别是，潘恩对公共债务进行了系统的批判，以此作为讨论政治主权、社会契约和国家真正财富等问题的一种令人信服的方式。1796 年，在法国，潘恩以吉本的《罗马帝国的衰落与衰落》（1776 年）为灵感，出版了《英国金融体系的衰落与衰落》，发表了对英国经济战时资金的批评。潘恩谴责英国战时扩张主义造成的经济自残，主要集中在小威廉·皮特首相的改革上，他将英国的公共债务部分私有化。此后英镑由神秘的私人贷款维持，其条款在公众舆论中模糊不清。这篇文章认为，这本小册子与大卫·休谟 1752 年发表的《公共债务》有许多相似之处，休谟在七年战争后对公共债务进行了激进的批判。潘恩的许多论点的休谟起源都体现在与军费开支相关的公共债务的腐败性质上。在休谟和潘恩看来，战时国家借债的花哨形式导致扩张主义专制主义的破产以及交战帝国的最终“衰落和衰落”。