The Freedom Files

Winner of the Advocates for Self-Government Lights of Liberty Award!

The Freedom Files

"Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, le monde va de lui-meme."

DIY since 2001…

Hello Freedomphiles! Well, tomorrow is the Fourth of July – the anniversary of America’s Independence Day, and since you all know I have a lots of love for the Founding Fathers – especially Thomas Jefferson – I assume that you expect a Freedom File on the Declaration of Independence. In true capitalist form, I intend to give the people what they want.

On July 4, 1776, something unique and extraordinary happened in the British colonies in America. A group of lawyers, teachers, doctors, and statesmen signed their own death warrant – a document wherein they pledged each other “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Now, the extent to which they suffered for this has been exaggerated by a misleading essay that’s been circulating for a few years. No one knows exactly who wrote it, but Rush Limbaugh, my beloved Advocates for Self Government, and myself were all at one time or another fooled by it – Limbaugh in his Limbaugh Letter and the Advocates in their Liberator Online. If you’d like the real story about the rebel’s fate, read this essay from The Heritage Foundation. Regardless of this historical urban legend, the Founders did risk everything when they signed that paper.

It’s taken for granted that they signed this declaration, but little thought is given to why they would do something so obviously reckless. Surely, it would have been easier, safer, and more prudent to just go to war and divvy up the credit later. In fact, what they were doing was breaking the law – high treason, punishable by death – and the first thing they did was hand over a signed confession.

Is there any rational reason why fifty-six intelligent men would do such a thing? Actually, there is. Theirs was a moral revolution. Like Thoreau after them, they felt no need to follow laws that were not just – but knowing the responsibility that comes from taking a moral stand, these men had to clearly define their grievances and state their purpose.

When Thoreau refused – in a fit of civil disobedience – to pay his taxes because he was against the Mexican-American War, he didn’t evade the spotlight of truth, he jumped into it and made a bold proclamation. When Emerson paid Thoreau’s taxes and came to get him out of the pokey, he asked the jailed writer what he was doing in there. To which Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”

In this same way, the Founders had to make a bold pronouncement based on moral principle. This American Revolution was not just about tea taxes and redcoat squatters – this revolution was about the nature of man.

Up until that point in history, the almost universal consensus among the governing bodies of the world was that man belonged to the State, that man’s nature put him in choice-free service to the greater community, and his own needs and desires were secondary. In fact, this is an ideology still hard to shake. For evidence, look to our wealth redistribution policies and the selective service. Your life is not your own – our government compels you daily to work so that someone else can enjoy the fruits of your labor (much like slavery), and if the need arises, the State can compel you to kill or die for any cause it deems worthy.

What Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers believed was that man was sovereign – that his life belonged to him and no one else – that acts of compulsion were antithetical to a free society and poison to a free people, regardless of its point of origin – man or the State. This sovereignty is the true nature of man, and it is his (or hers is also implied) right as a human being to retain it. That right is imprescribable, or as the Founders said, unalienable: No man or government has the right to take that away from him.

That is why they signed their names to the document that found these ideas to be so obvious, they were self-evident: “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”

If they had felt that people had the resources to protect their own life, liberty, and property, they rightly would have left us completely free to enjoy life in utopian anarchy. But they knew that there had to be one organization of men left with a monopoly on force, that would protect this voluntary collective from those that would abrogate those rights, from within and without. They also knew, as Thomas Paine pointed out, that government, at best, is a necessary evil, and at worst, an intolerable one, so they concluded that “to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…”

In other words, governments are created by men to protect their life, liberty, and property from theft, violence, and fraud, to enforce contracts, and settle disputes between citizens. In this way, a government can be impartial, bound to follow strict, narrowly defined set of rules when arbitrating a dispute or when using its monopoly of force to protect us.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, said, “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort…This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

And what is his own? His life, his liberty, and his property. His life, of course, is his – no one can rightfully take that away from him. His liberty, much like his sovereignty and truly its symbiotic twin, is his right to live his life as Jefferson said, “free to regulate [his] own pursuits of industry and improvement.” And property? Property is your life, your liberty, and everything you earn by gainful employment of them. Quoting Madison again, I will say, “as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”

It was those principles which led the Founders to believe that if those rights are not protected or are even abrogated by the government, it is your right – your duty – to “alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

In fact, their principles were so complete, that it was only after three days of heated debate, that the representatives from South Carolina and Georgia forced Jefferson to strike the following passage from the Declaration:

He [King George II] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce…. [emphasis his]

Such was the shockwave created by an amazingly bold proclamation of the rights of man that it affected the whole world. It laid the moral groundwork for the Civil War and the abolitionist movement in general. This political system, married to its only logical and consistent economic system – free-market capitalism – infected much of the world and even Great Britain, the country we broke free from, embraced it with the repeal of their Corn Laws. As a result, this system, as Ayn Rand illustrated, “gave mankind the longest period of peace in history.” [emphasis hers]

It is this proclamation that gives the philosophical basis for civil rights, human rights, and individual rights struggles all over the world. Our Independence Day is not just the birth of a nation, it is the birth of a movement – a promise to all oppressed peoples of the world that theirs is a noble struggle, their end a just one. It was the birth of a movement that has done more to improve the welfare of the world than any other movement born of man.

Until next time, make this Independence Day a great one!

-Rick

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