After thousands of years of struggle through oppression and tyranny, there came one perfect moment in human history: July 4, 1776. On a hot, summer day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of the thirteen united States of America–the American Declaration of Independence. It was the crowning political achievement of the Enlightenment, distilled into a single page.
The American Formula
The American idea is straightforward: The life of the individual, not the collective, whether represented by society, the state, or some other collective conception, is the center of personal and political life; the standard of moral value.
Aristotle called this idea eudaimonia—human flourishing.
As Leonard Peikoff explains in The Ominous Parallels, his examination of the philosophical roots of totalitarianism and its rise in America:
“For Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle — a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character — is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.””
America proposes simply that we each be free to see what we can achieve:
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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
For the first time a nation was founded on an idea; on rational, moral principles. When Thomas Jefferson wrote these immortal words in 1776, he gave us the formula for a successful human life and civilization. A nation based on principles consistent with the nature of reality. The result is no accident: the United States of America has been a stunning success.
Where are we today?
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, we are confronted with ballooning government, self-doubt, and the election of avowed Marxists.
Despite the challenges, our ideas stand as strong as ever.
The principles of independence are the cure for socialism. Throughout history, socialism in all its various forms including communism, fascism, or “social democracy,” is a disease that has murdered hundreds of millions, starved hundreds of millions more, and imprisoned the rest in misery.
It always ends in death because death is the final solution to resistance.
It is based on a pinched, narrow view of humanity. A view that individuals do not have value and rights in and of themselves, and that an elite, more evolved few should rule over them.
Their philosophical heritage comes through Karl Marx from Georg Hegel (with more distant roots traced to Plato’s totalitarianism). Hegel held that the state was the highest expression of reason and that freedom and collective life would somehow come together through it. “Scientific socialism” expresses that belief. Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s and Russia in much of the twentieth century exemplified the concrete manifestation of these ideas, and their murderous results.
The American idea offers us the solution as it always has. Jefferson’s formulation of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness recognized that human beings, by their nature as human beings, must be free. They must be free to live their lives for themselves, not for a king, a majority, or society.
Human beings do not possess the natural advantage of fur, claws, and instincts like the lower animals do. Our survival depends instead upon the exercise of virtue. Chief among these virtues is reason. Because reason cannot function under coercion, we must be free to apply our minds, make independent judgements, and take action to improve our lives. Liberty protects that requirement. We must be free to choose and pursue those values each of us thinks, according to our own judgment, are most likely to achieve our safety, security, and prosperity—our Happiness, in Jefferson’s formulation.
Jefferson went on to give us guidance in the Declaration on the sole purpose of government, to protect liberty:
That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
When people are not free, they are reduced to being less than human, because the requirement for their survival, let alone their ability to prosper and flourish, is eliminated. America has been a success because its essential nature met the conditions for success—individual freedom protected by political liberty.
All centrally planned, collectivist schemes ultimately struggle and fail because of their denial of nature and reality; because of their fundamental violation of freedom with force and coercion; their violation of freedom of action, self-interest and self-determination. America met those requirements, however, and flourished as a result, becoming a beacon of hope to all people everywhere. A “shining city on a hill.”
Property rights are the bulwark of freedom.
The first property right is self-ownership, the ownership each person has in his or her own life. If you don’t control the product of your effort, you are not free. In an 1816 letter to Joseph Milligan, a prominent bookseller, Jefferson wrote from his home at Monticello that, “the first principle of association is the first guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
In his first Inaugural address after being elected president in 1800, Jefferson went on to make clear the limits of government power in concert with liberty:
“A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
America is a moral nation because it was founded on a moral ideal that is consistent with reality. Reality is immutable; unchanging. Human nature requires freedom for success; for self-interested, goal-directed action. It always has and always will. The more perfectly that freedom is protected, the more success people will have. The more it is violated, the more people and their societies will struggle or fail.
The American ideal expressed in the Declaration further acknowledges that your life is an end in and of itself. That your happiness is the noble, moral pursuit of your life; that you are not simply a means to the ends of others. People are not robots to be programmed with someone else’s script for their lives. To be cajoled or guilted into fulfilling someone else’s plans and priorities. Jefferson, in his final letter, to Henry Lee, put it thusly:
“The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
If human beings are to flourish, we must be free. To be less than free is to be less than human. The labels of the collectivist variations that violate freedom such as socialism, communism, fascism, slavery, feudalism, progressivism don’t really matter. All forms of collectivism fail because they must fail, because they are inconsistent with the nature of reality; with the nature of a truly human existence.
Going forward
July 4, 1776, gave us that one perfect moment in history. It was ours to build on as we did with the Constitution of the United States—a brilliant, if imperfect, effort to translate the principles of the Declaration into a limited government—and later the necessary and inevitable abolition of the horror and logical contradiction of slavery.
It is also ours to erode as we have done, particularly since the early twentieth century, tolerating an ever more powerful and destructive federal regulatory, welfare/warfare state that no longer respects the limits placed upon it by the Constitution.
That one perfect moment in July of 1776 gave us the roadmap, the perfect formula for a successful human existence and a flourishing human society—The American Declaration of Independence.
We are, and of right ought to be, free and independent beings.
Our prosperity, our flourishing, and our very lives depend on it.
The Declaration was never merely an American document.
It was a declaration for all people everywhere about the nature of man and the necessary conditions for human beings to flourish. Every generation chooses whether to advance those principles or abandon them. Right now, the responsibility belongs to us.
We can secure the future, but we must reject the ideas of tyranny in all its forms, regardless of political party affiliation, and embrace the principles that made us great in the first place.
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Happy Independence Day.
Let’s see what we can achieve.
--The Honorable Don Beezley is President of Proforma Partners Business Brokerage; In the Business of selling Your Business Since 1987. A passionate advocate for freedom, he is a former state representative in Colorado House District 33. Don also served as Vice President for Development at the Cato Institute. His Substack can be found at: https://substack.com/@4heavenonearth