Was Franklin a Communist?

This quotation taken from Edmund S. Morgan's Benjamin Franklin is sure to spike the blood pressure in the terminally conservative.  Or perhaps I miscalculate:

"And in a letter to a friend Franklin gave his view that, "what we have above what we can use, is not properly ours, tho' we possess it."

There are a great many ways to read this line, and I suspect that it will rapidly become one of my favorites.

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