This Country? My Country. Our Country.

The media appears to be mandating a style manual that requires them to say "This country" whenever they refer to the United States of America.  Whatever happened to "My country" or "Our country?"

Whatever happened to Americans having a commitment to the USA?  How could you better signal your lack of investment in the United States of American than by constantly referring to it as "This country?"

The people of Fox, CNN, NPR, ABC, and CBS all refer to "My country" as "This country."  We need to ask ourselves why are they so blatantly telling us that they have no deep stakes in the country whose central principle is a respect for the many and broad rights of the individual?  Yes, many of those media people are authoritarians with a commitment to destroying the American Principle.  Many are the political evolution of slaveholders, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, educational segregation (Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden and a host of other Southern Democrats), segregation within the government (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the creation of the welfare state and its chains of dependency (FDR, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Obama), including the discouragement of two-parent families, and a host who argue that some ethnic groups and females are unable to compete in a free market and must be provided with government-enforced advantages.

But why are the Fox people, who buy into at least much of the American Principle, going blindly along with this alienation for individual rights and for all those individual freedoms that the United States of America advanced more assiduously than other nations did throughout its history?  Apparently, they do not understand how they are signaling their own lack of integrity to the most important commitment a civilized people can make.

Freedom-loving Americans must take adamant possession of the American Principle that every American has many and broad rights which no combination of elitist and no-nothing authoritarians should be allowed to suppress.  We should be proud to be Americans, to embrace the American Principle, and to call the United States of America "My country."  When talking to other individuals who share these values with us, as all good people should, we should speak of "Our country."  Do not allow the authoritarians to dictate an alienated style of speech designed to sever our commitment to the American Principle and our country's proud history of pursuing and adhering to it.

Comments on Immigration Policy

The basic American Principle is the understanding that the individual is sovereign, individual rights are broad and should be inviolate, and that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the exercise of every individual's right.  Unfortunately, few Americans understand this.  Many fewer understand this in most countries of the world.  What is more, not only do they recognize few if any individual rights in many countries, but even compared to most Americans of an authoritarian bent, they believe in much more brutal suppression of individual rights.  In some countries, the majority of the people do not believe in even such simple and fundamental freedoms as freedom of speech, freedom of press, or freedom of conscience.  Freedom of conscience means one is free to exercise a different religious belief or none at all.  One is free to exercise a moral belief which has no basis in any religion.  Our immigration policies should recognize the severity of the problems for our society that these differences in belief, which are often very firmly held, will have.

We should welcome everyone who believes in the American Principle as an immigrant.  It is reasonable to allow people to come to the United States as immigrants who are good candidates to learn this principle better in time and provided they are not too firmly set in beliefs that are anathema to this American Principle.  I see no reason to welcome immigrants who are adamantly opposed to the American Principle.  I do not see a reason why one is obliged to welcome someone into one's home who means to abridge your individual rights.  Yes, of course, my freedom of association and my property rights allow me to select who will enter my literal home.  There is some difference as to the limits of restriction one can impose in one's country without being intolerant and unwelcoming to different viewpoints and ideas.  As long as the differences of opinion and belief do not consist of a permission or a moral imperative to initiate the use of force to violate the rights of another individual, our society should be welcoming to newcomers who many have many very divergent viewpoints. But we do not as a People who control a government which is supposed to protect everyone's rights have a moral obligation to welcome individuals to the United States who want to suppress the rights of other individuals by the use of force.  Indeed, it is irrational to do so.

Every individual right exists in the context that each individual has that right only so long as he or she does not deny the exercise of that same right to others by the use of force.  I understand that many Objectivists and many libertarians believe that a complete open door immigration policy is a moral requirement.  That belief fails to understand the context for individual rights which I have just named. As I have pointed out before in The Pre-Conditions for Religious Freedom Unmet by Islam, there is no right to emulate The Profit Mohammed's use of force to spread Islam and to prevent anyone from giving up the religion.  There is no right to establish a government based on Islam.  There is no right to restrict criticism of Islam in speech or in the press.

The following article by Nick Saffran of AEI is quite interesting in addressing the problem of welcoming immigrants from many or most of the Muslim majority nations: Terrorism Is Not The Only Reason To Be Skeptical of Muslim Immigration.

Why is American Independence Day Exceptionally Worthy of Celebration?

We are often told that we celebrate the 4th of July because American troops have fought to keep us free.  Or, it is simply claimed that the USA is the greatest country on Earth.  Some even say America is exceptional, but too often stumble over an explanation as to why that is so or was so.  Some say it is because America is a democracy.  None of these explanations is worthy of those Americans who have understood or who do now understand the real basis for American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism is founded on the fact that the United States of America was to have a government that recognized that:

• All individuals are equal before the law.
• Each individual has the right to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of happiness and these rights are broad.
• Government is not the source of these individual rights.
• Legitimate government exists to protect these individual rights.
• Legitimate government has a very limited scope and no powers but such as are enumerated in the people's mandate for government, the Constitution. 

Together, these requirements and aims of government constitute the American Principle.

Today, only a minority of Americans believe in the American Principle.  Because of this, the United States of America has definitely lost much of its Exceptionalism.  The Index of Economic Freedom of the Heritage Foundation says the USA is the 12th freest nation, rather high in the group of mostly free nations, but falling once again compared to earlier rankings. The Simon Fraser Institute and Cato Institute do an evaluation of economic freedom around the world also.  Their 2013 report on the degree of freedom in 2011 places the USA in the number 17 position and falling from its earlier rankings.  So, yes the USA is the world's most powerful country.  It is a comparatively free country.  But it is not the world's freest country.

Frankly, the USA is not living up to the American Principle.  It is the American Principle that would make us the freest country in the world.  It is this principle that provides the basis for the great opportunities for personal happiness that we have often provided better than other countries in the past.  On Independence Day we should all be renewing our commitment to the American Principle and we should be paying respect to those Americans who were committed to it in the past and to those who are committed to it today.  We should all be eager to see America once again the premier country in the world with respect to our most important political value, our Liberty as individuals.

American Thinker Article Quoting Me on Principled vs. Pragmatic Government

While this is not new news, I just became aware of an American Thinker article called Government of the Elites, by the Elites and for the Elites by Monty Pelerin with a significant quote from my post entitled Principled Versus Pragmatic Government.  I recommend that you read the Monty Pelerin article and re-read my article and think about them prior to this election.

I am not quite convinced that a collapse of government is required to re-set government as principled, limited government as Monty Pelerin concludes, but given the bias toward pragmatic government and against principled government now thoroughly imbuing our education system and most of the media, the road back to principled government is a very difficult and perhaps even an unlikely one.  Aspects of the Tea Party Movement and the increased awareness of the thinking of Ayn Rand offer us some hope that a revival of demand for principled and limited government might be eventually embraced by the majority of the People.  I hope we can avoid that very painful collapse of government yet, but we very well may not.

Somebody Else Built My Business!

Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:



Obama also said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

 If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

My response:

Somebody else invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment.  Somebody else had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1.  Somebody else paid for a high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three daughters.  Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks.  Somebody else acted as an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.  Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my laboratory facility and equipment.  Somebody else trained employee after employee.  Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems.  Somebody else slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis or two through the night.  Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch straight through to meet a deadline.  Somebody else wrote thousands of analytical reports.

Somebody else paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient to provide it.  Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.  Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be known and understood by any small business owner.  Someone else had to fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.  Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year after year.  Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and holiday.

I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was mistaken in thinking it was me.  Now that I know otherwise, I am asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.

But, one thing I am really certain about is this:  I do not owe governments a penny more than they have already received from me and my business.  The first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off.  Any penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my life and my family's lives just that much harder.  Much of that money is actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual rights.

It is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming election is really about.  He is right that his vision of how our society and our government should operate is very different from that of those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is the protection of individual rights.

Those of us who believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely protective of individual liberty.  We are also grateful for those many productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative, founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively independent-minded.  We have long had a society that expected Americans to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives responsibly.  There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.  This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.

Our society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values.  We have been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary exchanges of ideas, goods, and services.  I, for instance, could not operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts for my laboratory equipment.  I am very grateful to them for offering me that critical service.  But, I also pay them well for providing that equipment and the replacement parts.  My customers pay for my services because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often suggest how they can prevent the problem.  They are able to make more money because of the service I provide them.  But, our largely private sector society of free trade and associations provides the very mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.

Obama wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association.  He wants to kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us.  He wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us and impose them upon us using the full force of government.  He says that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more.  This Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.  Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons of water down your throat now is better.  There are many things which have an appropriate level, which when exceeded begin to cause harm and when greatly exceeded cause great harm.  Obama's argument is shear sophistry.  It is wifty logic.

I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty.  OK, Obama has a great propensity for ditzy logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today.  Apparently, that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce suitable subjects for a socialist tyrannical government.  The biggest ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system promoting socialism, is Obama.

Good is done when two or more people agree upon a voluntary exchange.  This may be in business or it may be in a non-commercial endeavor.  What is good for each of us is very different and we work out the complex evaluations of good in accordance with our personal values in the private sector.  While limited government is essential for the purpose of securing our individual rights, larger government can only compromise the individual values of most of us most of the time.  As government grows beyond its legitimate rights protecting function, it necessarily becomes an individual rights violator.  Government cannot do the complex calculus which 310 million Americans do in living and managing their own lives on a completely voluntary basis with others in all things with which government is not involved.  Of course, that assumes that government would even want to do good for each of us if it could.  The history of big governments in all times and places indicates that they do not want to do such good.  Good government, like good doctors, first does no harm.

ObamaCare: No Due Process, Unconstitutional Tax

It is said that the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ObamaCare is constitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius provided that the penalty for not buying the expensive health insurance plan mandated by the government is redesignated a tax, is not entirely bad because by a 7-2 decision the court decided that ObamaCare was unconstitutional under a basis provided by either the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause.  It is now well-established that there are some limits to the powers granted the government by these other clauses of the Constitution, which had been the primary basis for the Obama administration claim that ObamaCare was constitutional.  The law was held to be constitutional as re-written by Chief Justice Roberts.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court declared a highly unconstitutional law to be constitutional, as it has long had a tendency to do.  It has violated the fundamental American Principle that forms the foundation for the purpose and function of the government which the Constitution mandated as the will of the People.  The Constitution written and signed by the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and which went into effect after 9 states had approved it in 1789, was a reformation of the government of the United States of America.

The United States of American began with the Declaration of Independence, signed 2 July 1776 and announced publicly on 4 July 1776.  The Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that every individual has an equal and inalienable (or sovereign) right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It was understood that these individual rights were not granted by government and that they resided in each individual man by virtue of his nature.  Individual human rights included the right to property.  The most important property each man held was his own body and mind and his labor.  The Declaration of Independence decreed that any government that violated an individual's rights was illegitimate.  Government should have as its purpose and sole function the protection of individual rights.

This American Principle of highly limited government devoted to the protection of the rights of the individual, was the basis for the government mandated by the People in the Constitution for the same United States of America which took effect in 1789.  The continuation of our government in a new form did not result in an abrogation of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, which ended the American Revolutionary War and created a number of agreements which the Great Britain had still not fulfilled in 1789.  President Washington continued to try to hold the British to those requirements of the Treaty of Paris.  We were not a new country in 1789 and we still owed our existence and our birth as a nation to the Declaration of Independence.  While the powers given to the government by the Constitution were thought by many to be so restricted and limited that the government could not pose any threat to individual rights, most Americans worried so much about some future infringements that they demanded the Bill of Rights as a condition of their approving the Constitution.  The People then thought the Constitution with its Bill of Rights was a clear mandate for a government that could not violate our sovereign individual rights.

It was well-understood that government, while needed to protect individual rights, was also very inclined to add to its powers until government became the primary violator of individual rights.  Such is the case in the United States of America today.  The federal courts have neglected the context in making decisions of law generally and constitutional law in particular that is provided by the foundational  American Principle.  Without the repeated and constant guidance of that principle, long strings of court cases were decided and precedent was established which provided government with more and more of the additional powers it desired, but which caused government to become the primary violator of individual rights in the USA today.  Such unguided and out-of-context decisions greatly expanded the powers of government by expanding the scope of the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the power to tax without regard to the effect upon our individual rights.  As a result, Congress was under the impression when it passed ObamaCare that these clauses of the Constitution gave it the power to do almost anything it chose to do.

Precedent is important and helps people to understand the law and its interpretations and to prevent sudden interpretation changes.  This is true only if those precedents were established in a manner consistent with the American Principle, however.  In our case decisions too often have not been consistent.  Any interpretation of the Constitution or of any law deemed to be constitutional, must be consistent with the requirement that legitimate government cannot violate individual rights.  It is the American Principle that makes the United States of America exceptional among nations and which legitimately causes a freedom-loving People to admire what they once had here in the United States of America.


ObamaCare: Due Process Failure

From early in the legislative process to create ObamaCare, the American People have been deprived of due process in this law which will have very drastic effects upon our lives and the exercise of their rights.  I have discussed many of these in the past and the present 5-4 Supreme Court decision has added to the list of due process failures.  The following is a list of many of these due process failures:

• The name of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a misrepresentation of the act.  It was always clear it would make health care more expensive for almost everyone and that the quality of healthcare would suffer for most people.  The act was a fraud perpetrated upon the People, so they were less likely to bring appropriate pressure upon their elected representatives to oppose its passage and protect their individual rights.
• The principal effect of ObamaCare was to turn ownership of every individual's body and the mental health of their minds to the collective in the most direct and obvious violation of individual rights.  The intent of the law was to force individuals to buy a more expensive and comprehensive insurance policy than most need as an individual so that free-riders could not game the government intrusion into the health care system that already controlled half of that marketplace.  It was also so that a very small fraction of people with pre-existing conditions could get health insurance.  But, neither the plight of a few people with pre-existing conditions nor some free-riders, could justify any constitutional judgment that ObamaCare was an act of legitimate government.  Clearly, most people were going to suffer a real and important loss of their ability to manage their own lives, decide how to protect their health, and were going to suffer a loss of happiness while forced to wait in pain for long periods to see overworked, underpaid, and angry doctors whose medical skills and equipment were going to suffer degradations relative to the free market alternative.
• Each of our elected representatives and the President have an obligation recognized in their oath of office to protect the Constitution.  They are clearly in violation of this oath every time they vote for or sign into law a bill which they have not read.  This is a major violation of due process and should be recognized as such.  The votes of any Senator or Representative who did not read the bill and properly judge whether it was constitutional or not are invalid votes.  This being the case, the bill did not pass either the House or the Senate legitimately and with due process.
• Many additional effects of the law were misrepresented. It was claimed over and over that if one liked one's present health care insurance plan, one could keep it.  The law clearly did not allow this.  It was said over and over that the panels that would decide what medical care would be provided to whom, were not Death Panels, and yet these same panels are declaring that many life-saving operations previously provided to those 70 and over will no longer be offered or provided.  The same will be true of newborn infants.  Life or death will be decided by these panels, but we cannot recognize that function!  Fraud once again was practiced to ease the passage of this law, which barely did so.  Perhaps some Senators and Representatives were fooled by these fallacious claims and would not have voted for the bill had they known.
• Tax bills must originate from the House of Representatives.  This bill is full of new taxes, even prior to the Supreme Court ruling that the penalty is really a tax.  This bill did not originate in the House.  H.R. 3590 was a bill called Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 which was passed by the House, whose name and content was completely changed by Senator Harry Reid and turned into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  This was a transparent violation of the Origination Clause requiring revenue bills to come from the House.  Chief Justice Roberts chose to take no notice of this constitutional violation, though the dissenting opinion did note it.
• ObamaCare is essentially a huge outline of a bill which ceded the responsibility of the Congress to write bills in large part to agencies under the Executive Branch who are writing or have written thousands of pages of rules and regulations to implement ObamaCare which Congress has not reviewed in fulfillment of its constitutional duty.  These Executive Branch agencies and cabinet departments are not constitutional allowed to establish laws.
• Tax laws cannot be reviewed by the Federal Courts until the taxes in them take effect.  This case was reviewed by the Supreme Court and allowed to stand even as that court claimed that the huge penalties of the bill were taxes.  Those taxes are not yet being assessed, so this bill should not have been reviewed under due process at this time.  The fact that the decision was rendered is in direct contradiction of the decision that the penalty is a tax.
• The bill claims the penalties for not buying the government mandated health payment plans are not taxes.  The American people were told by many Senators, Congressmen, and the President that they were not taxes.  Indeed, the purpose of a tax is to raise revenue, while that of a penalty is to compel behavior.  This compelling of behavior was the aim of the ObamaCare bill.  Justice Roberts says the tax is not high enough to force anyone to buy ObamaCare health insurance, so it does not compel behavior, so it is not a penalty.  This is a tortured viewpoint.  Since the majority of the Supreme Court now says they are taxes, even if this bill had been passed by Congress and signed into law under due process, that due process would have been forfeit now.  The Supreme Court is not authorized by the Constitution to create new legislation on its own as it just did.  Laws are made in Congress, which has the first pass on deciding whether a law is constitutional or not.  Then the President has an opportunity to veto a bill if he thinks it is unconstitutional.

ObamaCare is Now an Unconstitutional Tax

Chief Justice Roberts and the four radical leftists on the Supreme Court redesignated the penalty for not buying a particular prescribed government health "insurance" policy at an elevated cost largely dictated by conditions of inclusion set by the government to be a tax.  This tax is a direct tax and has not been apportioned among the states as required by Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

This means that any direct tax can only be levied upon a state in proportion to its population.  Presumably an income tax would be based on all income in the U.S. and each state would be required to provide a tax in proportion to its state population.  If the federal government decided that tax on income was to be 20%, then the tax to be collect would be (0.2) I, where I is the total national income.  If a particular state has a population which is equal to 2% of the national population, then it has to provide income tax revenue in its state of (0.02)(0.2) I to the federal government.  This makes it constitutionally impossible for the federal government to levy a progressive direct income tax and it means the tax in a given state will not be in the same proportion as income in that state.

The 16th Amendment seems to most Americans today to have created an exception to this injunction against direct taxes for the specific case of income taxes.  This was not so, because at the time this amendment was passed, income was considered to be, and was affirmed as such by the Supreme Court in Eisner v. Macomber in 1918 and in Merchants Loan and Trust v. Smietanka in 1921 to be the profit a corporation made.  In earlier decisions, Pollock v. Farmer's Loan and Trust (1895) and Brushaber v. Union Pacific Rail Road (1916), the Supreme Court had ruled that to be an indirect tax, income had to be separated from its source.  If a corporation was paid rent money for a building it owned, it had to subtract its expenses for renting the building and this established separation from the source of the income.  The tax on the profit from the rental was an indirect tax.

The rulings of the Supreme Court make it clear that a so-called income tax levied upon an individual's salary, wages, tips, commissions, and bonuses are direct taxes and are prohibited by the Constitution.  These direct payments belong to the individual as a matter of right, because his labor is his property by right.  Despite such payments not having been considered to be income in 1913 when the Income Tax Amendment was approved, the Supreme Court has never since these early cases taken up the protection of the individual right to payment for one's labor.  The government now taxes these payments without separation and without subtracting expenses in clear violation of the individual right to one's own labor and its fruits.  One might say the Supreme Court did for the income tax what it has just done for ObamaCare.  It found a limited way for it to be started and then never re-examined those situations it said were unconstitutional.

In a completely specious argument, Chief Justice Roberts claimed the penalty was a tax since it was not levied on most people.  The fraction of the population upon which a tax is levied has nothing at all to do with its being direct or indirect. 

Justice Roberts said that a tax that forced Americans to buy the government prescribed health insurance would be unconstitutional.  He said a penalty high enough to do so would be unconstitutional.  But, he says since the present tax is too low to compel Americans to buy health insurance, it is constitutional.  If this law is not soon repealed, it will fail because too many Americans will pay the tax rather than buy the more expensive health payment plan.  Future Congresses will then raise the tax until individuals are compelled to buy the health payment plan and then by Roberts' decision the law will be unconstitutional.

But will the Supreme Court actually review such a law and declare it unconstitutional?  Based on the precedent of the income tax, no.  But the reasoning offered by Roberts and the majority is very specious and very flimsy.  It begs to be reversed.  It is no wonder the dissenting Justices are very unhappy about this decision.  This decision has brought great disdain upon the Supreme Court majority by those who value reason and expect it to be valued by the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court has once again failed to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

American Exceptionalism in the Moral Foundation of the Declaration of Independence

The United States of America is unusual in that it became a nation comparatively recently and  its People have maintained a similar philosophy of government, at least implicitly, throughout its lifetime.  For decades, however, the Progressive Elitists have been working hard to change that philosophy to one more like that of most nation-states and their societies.  What is the keystone of the American philosophy of government and why would Progressive Elitists want to change it?

The Declaration of Independence clearly spelled out the central fact of the exceptional American Principle of Government.  Without this great and noble document, our Constitution cannot be viewed in its proper context and becomes a much weakened limit on the scope and powers of government.  The United States of America were declared independent of Great Britain on 4 July 1776 with a very exceptional purpose in the annals of nations.  Other nations simply had a government controlled by aristocrats, commonly in an alliance with high-level clergy, who were empowered to protect the people and take care of them, at least in theory.  Our first founding document, The Declaration of Independence, clearly and emphatically states that a legitimate government is the tool of the People as the holders of sovereign, equal individual rights to protect and defend their rights.  This is the first part of the exceptional American Principle of Government.


Let us read this straight from the Declaration of Independence:

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 -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to 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.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are surfferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Legitimate government secures our individual unalienable rights.  Government cannot take our rights away from us and it certainly cannot give them to us.  Our rights are the result of our nature as thinking individuals who must use our independent minds to survive and to choose the values that we will act to gain or to keep.  At that time, it was assumed that the nature of man was given to man by a god, so therefore God was the giver of rights.  Prior to the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War in Europe, Americans had long been neglected by the government of Great Britain.  They had developed their own legislatures and had taxed themselves very lightly under local governments of very limited scope for a long time.  When Great Britain awoke to the fact that the Colonies had become rather well off and could be taxed to help pay off the huge war debt from the Seven Years War, they levied new taxes and sent of a swarm of new officers to the Colonies to tell Americans what they could and could not do.  By the standards of Americans then, the government of Great Britain had become illegitimate because it was violating the individual rights of the People.

The Constitution was ordained and established by the People as our second form of government in 1789 after they had found that the first form of government under the Articles of Confederation was somewhat too weak.  The People wanted a federal government more capable of providing defense, without too heavy a dependence upon the states.  They found it necessary to prevent the states from violating the property rights of the People and from prohibiting or impeding their trading with one another in commerce.  They needed a government more capable of dealing with foreign powers.  They needed a government to help them establish courts to handle disputes across state lines, nationwide postal service with post roads, patent laws, provide a common coinage, and common weights and measures so that the People in the various states might have some basic rules and means to develop more commerce with one another.

This was still a government of very limited scope and with a few, carefully enumerated powers.  This was not a government that gave the People certain rights.  It was the People, with their rights already in hand, who ordained and established the government.  That government had such limited powers precisely because the People knew that strong governments with wide-ranging powers become the greatest threat to individual rights.  Such governments always seek to expand their powers.  The People knew from history that freedom was lost in Greece and in Rome, for  instance, to  governments which had acquired too much power.  They knew of many other abuses of government power from British history.  The Americans were fortunate to know these things and fortunate to generally have escaped the indoctrination of government-run schools.

The Constitution has its moral foundation in the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution had to provide for a government with no more than minimal powers and scope or the government operating under it would necessarily become an instrument to violate the rights of the individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  This is the second part of the exceptional American Principle of Government, which was explained in the Declaration of Independence somewhat and enacted in the Constitution.  This must happen because the Rule of Law must apply to all, but few laws can be written to accommodate the highly differentiated and complex natures of thinking Men.  The Rule of Law requires that every law apply equally to every Man.

There are only a few laws that can comply with this requirement, however.  For instance, a law might say that no Man may initiate the use of force against another.  Such a law is consistent with the General Welfare since it is necessary for the protection of each and every Man's rights.  But once government takes on powers beyond the protection of the rights of every man, then every law becomes one to promote a special interest rather than the General Welfare.  For instance, a law of the form: Every Man with an income greater than $250,000 will pay a higher tax rate on his income than any Man with a lower income, is a special interest law, which violates the General Welfare by only addressing the welfare of those making less than $250,000 of income a year.  A law that requires a doctor to treat a patient who does not have enough money to pay for his treatment is another such special interest law which does not satisfy the condition that it provide for the General Welfare.  The doctor's right to his own Life and how he will spend the hours of it is violated.  He is not at Liberty to Pursue his own Happiness under such law.  This is a clear violation of the doctor's equal and sovereign individual rights.  The requirement by law that one must purchase a health insurance plan approved by government is a clear violation of the right of every Man to own his own life and to manage his own health care needs.  Some, for instance, might rationally be wealthy enough to be self-insured.  Others might have no need for a low-deductible policy or for mental health care.  Some may not need pre-natal care.  Individuals have differing needs and their values will differ accordingly.  Government laws under progressive governments deny these basic facts of reality.

The Constitution recognizes the importance of the Rule of Law applying equally to everyone many times.  It refers to the General Welfare as a requirement that must be provided for whenever any of the limited powers of government are executed.  The government is authorized to build military facilities, but it is not authorized to have the Speaker of the House give the construction contract to his son-in-law at three times the lowest responsible bid cost.  For him to do so, would be a violation of the General Welfare and of the Rule of Law.  The many laws that apply to all Americans except the members of Congress and/or their staff, are another example of special interest law in violation of the General Welfare and the Rule of Law.  Similarly, the award of government contracts only to those paying union wages is another obvious violation of the moral rule stated in the Declaration of Independence.

There is a presumption of liberty for the individual in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The long list of grievances against the interferences of Great Britain make this clear in the Declaration of Independence.  The entire effort to limit the powers and scope of government in the Constitution makes this clear in that document.  The long list of rights the government acknowledged in the Bill of Rights is another recognition of this fact, especially given the 9th Amendment which says:

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment clearly states that the government is not the source of individual rights.  The government has the duty to recognize and honor the unalienable rights of the every individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  The Declaration of Independence even implied that there were other rights not covered by that very broad combination of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness when it precedes that list of rights with "among these are."  I am not sure what rights are not covered by that list, which does cover many rights not listed in the Bill of Rights, but this is another strong example of the presumption of liberty which legitimate government must not violate.

The Declaration of Independence is a critically foundational document of the exceptional American Principle of Government.  Its moral principles provide the real backbone to the Constitution.  If one can eliminate the Declaration of Independence from our understanding of our moral duty as citizens and as a definition of legitimate government, then the Constitution is greatly weakened and becomes more subject to changing interpretations and tortured mutations of constitutional law and precedent. 

The central purpose of the Progressive Elitist is to make government much more powerful and to put it to the endless task of providing goodies for an endless list of special interests.  That list presently includes government employees, labor unions, big financial and car outfits with special protection by government against their bad business decisions, trial lawyers, government-run school teachers, non-competitive energy providers, ethanol refiners and blenders, farmers with subsidized crops, tariff-protected industries, low income housing users, high income housing owners who want green space, zoning laws, and building codes to keep lower income people away from their neighborhoods, and the unemployed who like sitting at home on unemployment benefits.  None of this is consistent with the General Welfare or the Rule of Law.  It is just faction against faction to win special interests at the expense of violating the individual rights of others.

Obama very clearly explained that he does not like the Constitution which is a barrier to his central purpose of redistributing the wealth by taking some of the People's time, money, and property and giving it to others of his choosing.  Vice President Biden explicitly stated that there are no such things as Natural Rights.  Rights are given to People by the government he says.  Of course, this means that People do not have unalienable rights.  If the Declaration of Independence is wrong about that, then it is also perhaps wrong in claiming that the People have equal rights.  It is certainly wrong in the minds of such Progressive Elitists for the Declaration of Independence to define legitimate government as that government that protects the equal rights of the individual to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  These two men are very aware that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution form a very strong front against their idea of government.  Indeed, Progressive Elitists very often claim the Declaration of Independence has no standing in the law.  How odd a claim this is given that it is the moral foundation upon which the Constitution rests.  But, as with a fortress, the Constitution is no stronger than its foundation.

The 9th Amendment has been virtually struck from the Constitution by Progressive judges.  Even the explicitly enumerated rights of the individual in the Bill of Rights have been split into categories which deserve strong protection and those which are mere after-thoughts.  Any right to pursue one's happiness through commerce is now completely subject to the whim of the government.  That means that the People have lost all of their economic rights, which most people spend many hours a day pursuing.  Clearly, such rights must be denied by a government that presumes to choose the People's values and to micromanage their lives with Central Planners.  This is the goal of the Progressive Elitists.  Obama is particularly derogatory about people who pursue their happiness in part by making money or creating wealth.  This predilection against commerce explains why he has proven so effective in destroying the jobs many Americans once had in the private sector.

Note also that the Declaration of Independence says the People have a moral duty to change the form of their government if it becomes illegitimate by violating their rights.  This is a very scary idea for a Progressive Elitist who desperately wants to dictate our values to us and force us to live in accordance with those mandated values.  He believes the People are generally unable to wisely choose their values and are not up to managing their own lives well.  He lacks the faith of the Declaration of Independence in the People.

It is interesting in this light to note the study by two Harvard University professors, David Yanagizawa-Drott and Andreas Madestam in which they found that

The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century. Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party. Fourth of July celebrations in Republican dominated counties may thus be more politically biased events that socialize children into Republicans.

There are plenty of Progressive Elitists in the Republican Party, but they tend to be less radical than those in the Democrat Party and fewer in percentage.  The impact of 4th of July parades on the People that pushes them toward the Republicans is due to there being less resistance among Republicans to the ideas of our Declaration of Independence.  These ideas are still more in sync with those of the Tea Party.  It is these ideas that make Americans exceptional.  The Democrats have a great deal of difficulty seeing American principles as exceptional because they have dismissed all of our American principles and hold none that are unique to America.  Their core values all hinge on an aristocracy of college-indoctrinated elitists running the country by controlling its all-powerful government.  This is a variant of the Medieval concept of government that long-preceded the Scottish and French Enlightenment philosophy found in the Declaration of Independence.  The peasants in their society are the many who received just enough indoctrination in the government-run schools that they will be docile in obeying the government they are told has only their best interest at heart.  Such docile peasants bear no resemblance to the Americans of our founding period.

It is a fine thing to remember the great deeds of our veterans on the 4th of July, but let us also remember that we are celebrating the great and critically important ideas of the Declaration of Independence on that wonderful day.  They are the moral foundation of our Constitution and they inform of us of when our government is legitimate and when it is our moral duty to reform it.  It is clear that our present government is not legitimate and that we must reform it.  We must carry this realization with us into the election of 2012 and do our duty as defined by the most exceptional and moral American Principle of Government.  It is time to stand for that American Principle of Government as the Winter Soldiers did in our Great American Revolution.

Allegiance to the American Principle, Not to Democracy

Today in the United States of America, most of the People believe that the laws and regulations of the federal government, or for that matter of the state and local governments, should be what they want them to be.  They recognize that these laws cannot be what everyone wants them to be, however, so they decide the impasse should be decided by a virtually unfettered democratic vote.  This is a viewpoint which is inconsistent with the great and original American Principle:  Legitimate government must have limited powers and have the sole purpose of protecting and defending the equal, sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body and mind, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our revolt against Great Britain was justified in our Declaration of Independence.  That great document, written by Thomas Jefferson, with some modifications by Ben Franklin and John Adams, defines legitimate government as that government instituted by the People to secure the unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  To this list, I explicitly add the right to property and the ownership of one's own body and mind, because though these rights are fully contained in the shorter list of the Declaration of Independence, modern Americans have largely rationalized them into oblivion.

The early citizens of the states freed from colonial rule by Great Britain, established an initial form of government which was exceedingly limited at the national level and found that it was incapable of sufficiently providing for the defense of the nation and allowing free trade between the states, that the government needed to be strengthened.  The result was a new government mandated by the People with the very highly limited powers carefully enumerated in our Constitution.  These few powers primarily dealt with defense and foreign relations and trade.  Some of the powers had internal consequences such as the maintenance of post offices and post roads, the establishment of patent rights and copyrights, the standardization of money, and the regulation of trade between the states.  The purpose of these internal powers was to strengthen the communications, interactions, and trade of Americans, each of whom had the right to associate with other individuals to establish a wide range of relationships with them and to trade with them.  The strengthened ties across state lines had immense consequences for the thinly populated American states for their defense of their extensive territory.

The Framer's of the Constitution did not at first think the Bill of Rights was necessary.  The federal government they had provided for in the Constitution did not have the power to violate the rights of the individual as they interpreted its provisions.  But, the People who had to ratify it had concerns about just that issue.  Many states would not ratify the Constitution without more explicit protections of individual rights, so the Bill of Rights was written to protect those rights which the People had seen damaged by earlier governments, including most prominently those violated by Great Britain in their recent memory.  Amendment IX made it clear that the listed protected rights were not a complete list of the individual rights of the People.  Amendment X made it clear that powers not explicitly given to the federal government were retained by the People and the states.  The entire structure of the Constitution and its purpose in promoting the tranquility, justice, general welfare, common defense, and the blessings of liberty to the People, clearly is an attempt to provide a government of highly limited powers consistent with the legitimate government defined by our own Declaration of Independence.

Today, Americans usually test a proposal for a new law or regulation by asking whether it would be good for them as an individual or as they imagine it might be good for some group of Americans they think are not capable of acting in their own self-interest.  Most Americans fail to test a law against the American Principle.  Rather than ask if the proposed law or regulation is supportive of every American's individual rights, they ask only that it be good for them or for some particular group of Americans, or in some cases, some particular group of illegal aliens.  In that process, the critical role of individual rights is lost.  The tyranny of the majority or a plurality of voters is made the gold standard of legislative priorities and political morality.  This is a huge mistake.

It is one that the Framers of the Constitution were very aware of and from which they tried very hard to protect us.  The American people thwarted the Framers great work by adopting the very creative expansive interpretations of the powers to regulate interstate commerce, to tax, and to provide for the General Welfare that they were indoctrinated in by the Progressive Elitists who have taken over education and most of the media in America.  The Progressive Elitists eviscerated Amendment IX, claiming that the People have no rights except those explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.  This is not even a creative interpretation of the Constitution - it is a very willful determination to ignore an amendment so basic and critical that it was put into the Bill of Rights.  They have also largely ignored Amendment X, reserving powers to the states and the People.  Amendment XVII, gave the people of each state the vote for their Senators and undermined the republican form of government and state powers, promoting the idea that the United States was a nationwide democracy, subject to the tyranny of the plurality of voters throughout the nation.

In the recent health care reform debate, we observed how the loss of the American Principle twisted the terms of debate.  American governments have actually made it more difficult for the People to provide for their own medical care by interfering with the rights of the individual to choose his own medical providers, his own health insurance policy, and his own standards of medical quality.  While minorities of the debaters were aware of this, the federal government and most state governments have ignored these arguments and plowed ahead with their programs to increase their control over the People.  They refused to take the liberty-enhancing arguments seriously and promoted those of the Progressive Elitists who argued that the governments must exercise still more control over our medical and health care insurance options.  They argued that some people did not buy health insurance and they counted on the People thinking this was unwise.  The Elitists said they must buy health insurance and because some of them will not buy complete enough coverage, we will tell them what must be covered in their insurance plans.  Some people have health problems already, which means their insurance costs will be high, so we must set up large pools in which the healthy will pay much more for their insurance so that the known unhealthy can be covered at as low a cost as the healthy can be.  Thus, the healthy will be heavily taxed to subsidize the health care of the unhealthy and this will be the case even if the unhealthy are unhealthy because they have made themselves unhealthy.

The staying hand of the American Principle was barely discussed.  It was rarely noted that the reform plan greatly reduced a man's right to control and promote his own life.  It was rarely noted that it represented a government claim that the government owns a large share of our very bodies.  It was rarely noted that the plan was a hugely confiscatory transfer of wealth from the young and the healthy to the old and the unhealthy, as well as from the middle class to the poor, making this bill one with very unequal impact upon the citizen's individual rights and their welfare.  It was not noted that if one is not free to provide for one's own medical care and seek protection from pain, then one cannot be said to be free to pursue one's own happiness.  The necessary government rationing of health care in ObamaCare will take the power to seek relief from pain out of our individual hands.

We have seen the destruction of the American discourse on the extension of the Bush tax cuts as well.  The Progressive Elitists wish to increase taxes on Americans making more than something over $200,000 per year, claiming that those people can afford it.  Of course, they do not know all of those people, so it is patently absurd for them to claim that those people can afford it.  It is even more absurd that they think that it is their right to make any decision on who can afford to be taxed more.  If we all have equal rights, then the government should not be taxing some of us more than others of us.  Also, in the midst of the Great Socialist Recession, these Progressive Elitists are recommending many increased taxes on business activities, such as an increase in the capital gains tax rates, the corporation tax rate, and the death tax.  This is a straight play on the weakness of a democracy in that it wants to place greater burdens on those with fewer votes, so the majority will be given as large a bribe as possible to reward the governing Progressive Elitists with more power.  The American Principle that every American individual's rights are paramount, including those in business, is stomped upon.

The intimate body searches of the TSA in airports is being discussed vigorously, but many are refusing to give due consideration to the American Principle.  Amendment IV, written when Americans believed in the American Principle, says

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

When Dagny passes through the TSA security check area, no Warrant has been issued based on probable cause that she is carrying explosives onto a plane, yet she is searched in the most intimate way.  It really could not be more clear that this is a fundamental violation of her individual rights. All the talk that people will feel safer from terrorist attack if they are searched and therefore if Dagny is searched, is completely irrelevant.  It is fine for anyone who wishes to volunteer to be searched intimately, but it is not within their rights to force someone else, for whom they have no Warrant based on probable cause, to be searched.  This matter is no different in principle from

•  a random search of anyone to check if they are under the influence of marijuana,
•  randomly forcing people to describe what they were doing throughout the last 24 hours just in case they might have been involved in a crime which the government knows nothing about,
• a random stop to see if you are on the list of people who filed a tax return with the IRS last year or not,
• or a random search to see if you can prove that you are a documented U.S. citizen, immigrant, or visitor. 

You may argue that this is a matter of life and death, but I would argue that giving up the American Principle is a much more critical matter of life and death.  Besides, the present policy means that we have ceded victory to the terrorists, whose goal is less to kill some of us, than it is to degrade the quality of most of our lives.  A life without our equal, sovereign individual rights is a very degraded life.