The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America | Thomas Jefferson, Committee of Five

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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What exactly is America, and what does it stand for? These appear to be pertinent questions at a time when political turmoil and disagreement appear to make civil and respectful debate nearly impossible. Such issues are very appropriate at this time of year, when we commemorate the Declaration of Independence on July 4th.

Everyone in politics claims to represent “American values” and “the American way of life” and to want to protect or purify them. President Trump believes that in wanting to make America great again, or now, with the commencement of his reelection campaign, in wanting to “keep America great,” he is speaking for American ideals, under the assumption that his first years in office have effectively restored what had been lost. That, according to Donald Trump, is what tariff barriers and physical border walls are all about.

After the first two nights of Democratic Party hopefuls attempting to demonstrate why they should be their party's standard-bearer in the 2020 presidential election, it is obvious that they all want to preserve or enhance "American ideals" for a more socially equitable society, as they see it. How else can you understand their respective vows to make so many welfare and redistributive programs completely "free" for the taking by anybody who wants something — at someone else's cost, of course — if they don't believe freedom is vital to the American way of life? For them, “liberty” entails something for nothing for the many.

Everyone's Self-Evident Individual Rights

Has this got anything to do with the principles and way of life enshrined in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, which charted America's path for the following nearly 250 years? Let's look at the text itself, namely the opening section, which most students have heard — or at least used to hear — repeated over and over again in history and civics classrooms from coast to coast.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, governments are established among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these rights, it is abolished — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these rights, it is abolish

It's worth noting that the rights mentioned are stated to be prior to and apart from governments. Individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to come from a source higher than monarchs, princes, or democratically elected leaders. However, it should be noted that not everyone in America believes in or accepts the existence or power of such a supernatural authority today. As a result, the argument, it may be said, falls flat on its face. However, if one goes behind the Declaration of Independence to the intellectual foundations from whence these ideas emerged, it can be shown that reason was seen as a provable basis for these rights as much as any trust in God. Know details about committee of five.

Man's Rights and Right Reasoning

The ancient Romans developed their concept of "universal law" by asking, "What could dispassionate men of good will, regardless of their particular societal backgrounds, agree on as just and right among them, given the nature of man?" The ancient Romans developed their concept of "universal law" by asking, "What could dispassionate men of good will, regardless of their particular societal backgrounds, agree on as just and right among them, given the nature of man?" (See "The Ancient Romans, Who Went From Rule of Law to Inflation and Price Controls" in my essay.)

When John Locke explained and justified "natural rights" in his Second Treatise on Government (1689), he cautioned us not to take his justification of individual rights on trust alone. He requested that we reason with him. Isn't it true that we all want to protect and improve our own lives? Do we not all want to be safe and secure from our fellow humans' brutality and predation? Do we not all believe that if someone has taken previously unowned and underutilized natural resources and shaped them into a more useful and usable form by their mental and physical labors, it should be regarded "rightly" and "justly" the property of the person whose hands has fashioned it?

Wouldn't it be unfair for someone to violently or fraudulently steal something that someone had peacefully and honestly created, and therefore without their agreed-upon and free consent? Isn't it just as logical for individuals to create a shared system of protection and enforcement of an unbiased and impartial rule of law, dubbed "government"? (For more on John Locke and American Individualism, see my essay.)

In the words of Scottish philosopher Francis Hutchison (1694-1746), who taught at the University of Glasgow and was one of Adam Smith's prominent instructors, we may see the same appeal to introspective contemplation and reciprocal reasoning. The following is an excerpt from Hutchison's System of Moral Philosophy (1737):

The following inherent rights of each individual appear to be of the highest order: Every man has a right to life and to the perfection of his body that nature has bestowed.... Unjust attacks, maiming, and murder all breach this right.

Because nature has implanted in each man a desire for his own happiness... it is obvious that each one has a natural right to exercise his powers, according to his own judgment and inclination, for these purposes, in all such industry, labor, or amusements as are not harmful to others in their persons or goods....

Natural liberty is the name given to this right. Every man is aware of this privilege, as well as the wickedness or cruelty in interfering with others' joyous liberty....

Each person has a natural right to utilize such things as are in their nature suited for the common welfare of all; and a right to acquire property in such commodities as are fit for occupancy and property, and have not been occupied by others, by any innocent means....

For the same reasons, every innocent person has a natural right to engage in innocent offices or begin dealings with anybody who wishes to do so.

But don't individuals sometimes select incorrect or misguided courses of action? A more "contemporary" response to such a notion of personal independence and unrestricted individual liberty would be, But don't individuals sometimes choose wrong or misguided courses of action? Shouldn't they be limited in some aspects of their personal lives and "nudged" in the right direction? Hutchison also had something to say about it:

Allow men to train, teach, and persuade their fellows as much as they can about the right use of their natural powers, or persuade them to submit willingly to some sensible designs of civil power that will protect their vital interests. However, until this is accomplished, men must enjoy their inherent liberty as long as they do not cause harm to others [by breaching their individual rights].

This claim to natural liberty is implied by many charitable sentiments... as the vast grandeur and beauty of our nature, not only by the selfish aspects of our own constitution.

In presenting his case for government restraint, Hutchison also cautioned about and dreaded the paternalist state. Which government official or bureaucrat has the knowledge, wisdom, and competence to determine what each of us "really" deserves as a distributive portion of the total outputs of everyone in society's private actions? And wouldn't this quickly subject everyone to the political whims and personal judgements of those who wield so much money and social power? Or, to put it another way, as Hutchison put it:

It is unrealistic to expect magistrates to maintain such continual attention and fine discernment of merit in order to achieve both universal diligence and a reasonable and compassionate distribution.... What magistrate can evaluate the delicate connections of friendship, through which a great spirit can be so attached to another that he can cheerfully suffer all his toil for him?... And what policy will ever satisfy men adequately as to the proper treatment they should get... if all is dependent on the pleasures of the magistrate?... Is it necessary to regard all men in private posts as children or fools at all times?

Liberty's Reflecting Common Sense

As a result, the Declaration of Independence's philosophical foundations declare a self-evident reality of individual liberty and the right to honestly earned property that all persons of good will could and should agree with and regard as fundamental to a free, fair, and successful society.

Which one of us does not want to be respected and protected in the safety of our lives from injury and murder, I would ask any reader? Who among us does not want for the freedom to live our lives as our own views of what is pleasant, helpful, and valuable suggest? Who among us wants to be a human puppet at the end of strings tugged against our will and wishes by others? And who among us doesn't want others to engage with us in an open, honest, and fair manner?

Does it make a difference whether we are killed, restricted and restrained, or deceitfully manipulated by a private individual or a government, whether that government is an absolute monarchy or a democratically chosen group of politicians and appointed bureaucrats?

Anything the government undertakes that goes beyond ensuring such individual rights for each citizen must logically imply a reduction in one or more components of a person's liberty. It is the use of governmental power and authority to compel certain people to serve as forced servants or providers of different goods and services for the benefit of others.

Power concentration and arbitrary rule

In the Declaration of Independence, the American Founding Fathers described how untenable an absolutist and highly centralized government in faraway London had become. The inhabitants of the 13 colonies on the eastern shore of North America had their personal and civic freedoms infringed upon by this distant authority.

Furthermore, as part of the 18th-century system of government central planning known as mercantilism, the king's ministers placed rigorous and harsh economic rules and controls on the colonists.

The signers claimed, "The current King of Great Britain's history is a chronicle of repeated insults and usurpations, all with the express goal of establishing an absolute Tyranny over these States."

The British Crown centralized political authority and decision-making at every stage, leaving American colonists with limited capacity to run their own affairs through municipal and state governments. Local laws and processes intended to curb abusive or arbitrary governance were abolished or ignored, and laws and norms were imposed without the consent of the governed.

The king had also sought to control the judicial system by choosing judges who shared his power-hungering motives or were willing to be swayed to support the monarch's policy objectives. In breach of the writ of habeas corpus, the king's authorities unlawfully arrested colonists and condemned them to jail without a proper trial by jury. Colonists were frequently forcibly recruited into the king's military forces and forced to participate in foreign conflicts.

Without the approval of the local governments, the colonists were forced to pay for a financially onerous standing army. Soldiers were sometimes quartered in colonists' homes without their knowledge or consent.

Furthermore, the Declaration's writers claimed that the king stoked civil unrest by inciting tensions and disputes among the many ethnic groups in his colonial dominion (the English settlers and the Native American tribes).

Economic Liberty Is Being Infringed Upon by the Government

However, the economic constraints that curtailed their freedom and the taxes levied that stole their riches and honestly earned money were at the heart of many of their complaints and grievances against King George III.

The essential assumption of the mercantilist planning system was that it was the government's duty and obligation to regulate and direct society's economic concerns. The colonists' business operations were bound by a web of laws and limitations imposed by the British Crown. The British government informed them what they could and couldn't make, as well as what resources and technology they could use.

The government controlled what commodities were accessible to colonial customers and prohibited the free market from establishing prices and salaries. It regulated what commodities may be imported and exported between the 13 colonies and the rest of the globe, prohibiting colonists from reaping the benefits of free commerce.

The monarch appointed several magistrates across the kingdom who were to supervise and command most of the people's everyday work. Every aspect of life was forced with layer after layer of new bureaucracy. The Founding Fathers say, "He has established a number of New Offices, and brought hither swarms of Officers to annoy our people, and suck up their substance."

Furthermore, the monarch and his administration taxed the colonists without their permission. Their earnings were taxed to fund costly and expanding projects that the monarch desired and believed would benefit the people, regardless of whether the people wanted them or not.

Taxation that is too burdensome, tax evasion, and government that is too violent

The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, the Tea Act of 1773 (which led in the Boston Tea Party), and a number of other fiscal impositions were among the royal levies that burdened American colonists and enraged them in the 1760s and early 1770s.

Smuggling and bribery were common methods used by American colonists to circumvent and evade the Crown's rules and taxes. (In return for illegal molasses, Paul Revere transported Boston pewter into the West Indies.)

The British government retaliated harshly against the American colonists' "civil disobedience" against British rules and taxation. The king's troops and navy slaughtered civilians and wreaked havoc on people's personal property. The Declaration laments, "He has looted our oceans, devastated our coasts, burned our towns, and ruined the lives of our people."

To Be Free When Opposing a Repressive Government

After listing these and other grievances, the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We have petitioned for redress at every level of these oppressions in the most modest terms: our repeated Petitions have been met only with further damage. A Prince whose character is thus defined by every deed that can be used to describe a Tyrant is unsuitable to reign over a free people.

As a result, they took the historic step of declaring their independence from the British Crown. In their shared cause of creating a free government and individual liberty for the then three million residents of the initial 13 colonies, the signers of the Declaration “mutually pledged to each other our Lives, Fortunes, and sacred Honor.”

Never before in history has a people declared and then built a government founded on the individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

Never before has a society been founded on the ideal of economic liberty, in which free men are declared to have the right to live for themselves in their own individual interests, and to peacefully produce and exchange with one another on mutually beneficial terms, free from the stranglehold of regulating and planning government.

Never before had a people made it plain that self-government included not only the right to elect those who would hold political office and enact laws, but also the right of each human person to be self-governing over his or her own life.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers were saying in those inspirational words in the Declaration that each individual should be considered his own property, not the property of the state to be controlled by either the monarch or Parliament.

What a long way we've come from the aspirations of 1776. President Trump's watchword is national "greatness," not individual liberty. Raising tariffs and threatening trade wars is a continuation of the mercantilist regulatory systems of 18th-century Great Britain and France, which assumed governments' authority and obligation to control and direct international commerce.

In his Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (1820; 2nd ed., 1830), one of the most widely read books on economic principles in America throughout the 1820s and 1830s, American economist Thomas Cooper (1759-1839) highlighted the folly of all such interventionist policies:

True principles of Political Economy teach us that a system of restrictions and prohibitions on commercial intercourse cuts off the foreign market, reduces the number of buyers and demand for our national produce, and forces the consumer to accept less for his produce in exchange for paying more to the domestic monopolist. As a result, the nation's wealth is squandered; every consumer is deprived of luxuries that he could otherwise have, and his ability to purchase even basic household goods is harmed.

They also teach us that men should be free to create whatever it is in their best interests to produce, without intervention from the government; that they should not be forbidden from creating some goods or bribed to make others. That they should be free to judge and pursue their own interests; to exchange what they have produced when, where, with whom, and in whatever manner they find most profitable and convenient; and not be compelled by theoretical statesmen to buy dear and sell cheap; or to give more, or receive less, than they might do if left to their own devices, free of government interference or control.

These are the key maxims of Political Economy, which explain how to acquire the maximum amount of valuable goods at the lowest cost of labor. These are, in fact, maxims that are diametrically contrary to the typical practice of governments that believe they can never rule too much, and who are willing dupes of cunning and interested persons seeking to feed on the community's vitals.

Thomas Cooper also cautioned against making the methodological error of treating "nations" and "peoples" as if they were genuine, distinct, and alive entities distinct from the real individual human individuals who live, work, create, sell, and purchase in their unique efforts to improve their lives:

Much difficulty and regrettable error has arisen in the field of Political Economy as a result of the prevalent tendency to regard a nation as an existing intelligent being separate from the individuals who make up its composition, and possessing properties that belong to no individual who is a member of it. We tend to believe that national morality is distinct from individual morality, and that it is based on ideas that are fundamentally different....

The linguistic creature known as a NATION has been clothed in qualities that exist only in the minds of people who transform a word into a thing, and convert a syntactic construct into a living, intellectual being.

What Thomas Cooper outlined and warned about applies not just to those who insist on "making the country great," independent from and in addition to the forced sacrifices placed on a large number of actual human beings through trade restrictions and import levies. It has a modern American counterpart in individuals who conceptualize multitudes of unique and varied human beings as aggregated categories of "race" or "gender."

In Place of Individuals with Rights, the New Collectivism

Race and gender are deemed the defining and deciding features and characteristics of every member of society by “identity politics” practitioners; that is, persons are reduced to a skin color and a stated sexual orientation and “feeling.” Individuals, like nationalists, are nothing more than the collective categorization into which they have been classified for modern gender and “anti-racist” racial warriors who have established “identity politics.”

Human beings who are distinct and diverse, with their own rights, as stated and celebrated in the Declaration of Independence, vanish off the human stage. Groups, tribes, and collectives have "rights," and the individuals who make up these groups and tribes receive just what their allocated collective is considered "rightfully" deserving of through the pressure-group horse-trading of modern democratic politics.

“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” said Benito Mussolini of the hyper-nationalism he labeled “fascism.” Identity politics' gender and race warriors see a politically controlled and planned society in which the guiding principles are: everything inside your gender and race, nothing beyond your gender and race, and nothing against your gender and race. This is the twenty-first century's new gender and racial totalitarianism: a repackaged Mussolini for a postmodern "progressive" and "democratic" socialist society. (See my writings "Collectivism's Progress: From Marxism to Intersectionality" and "A Victory for 'Identity Politics' Would Mean the End of Liberty.")

All of this sadly demonstrates that when the backyard grills are fired up this July 4, and the burgers and brats are consumed in large quantities while being washed down with untold gallons of beer, and the beautiful fireworks are oohed and aahhed over as the evening sky darkens, much of what is claimed to be “the American way” or “American values” in our contemporary world has, in fact, little resemblance to what is claimed to be

But we should not let hopelessness or pessimism impair our celebration and pleasure of the day. We, who believe in the liberty for which the Founding Fathers risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in the war for independence, must do everything we can to restore that crucial understanding and appreciation of individual freedom and individual rights among our fellow citizens, without which the great American "experiment" in political, social, and economic liberty may be lost forever.

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