With the recent 250^th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, I thought it was appropriate to write about the key idea, the Declared Principle.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This text, which states the Declared Principle, is right from the document.

The idea that the individual properly lives for his own sake was an unprecedented achievement. The notion of a “right” prior to this was that of a claim to power, as in “Prince John had the right to the throne.” Or, “the Lord has the right to take the best fruits of the peasants’ harvest.”

Still more amazing was that they built a country on this idea. Think about the certainty, the courage, the intellectual will to commit so fully to an idea—not just any idea, but a radical principle and a new one—that they set it forth as the cornerstone of a new country. They knew that people are better off living free, than under the bootheel of a tyrant even when that tyrant claims to be serving them.

This idea necessarily, inevitably, inexorably leads to liberty for all. The Founders were not able to achieve it, but the Declared Principle had to lead to the end of slavery, and to full recognition of the rights of black people as people. And to the full recognition of the rights of women as people.

So long as the idea prevailed in the culture, then the people will enjoy growing prosperity, peace, and happiness. If you are reading this, then you know it didn’t last.

The idea is under attack. If the idea is ever repudiated, then respect for individual rights will be abandoned. And once again, there will be only competing claims to power. The repudiation of any idea, much less a powerful principle, cannot occur in one instant. It is a long process.

It may begin by policy which nobody realizes contradicts their foundational principle. For example, I don’t think that anyone viewed the Coinage Act of 1792 as a contradiction. This law fixed the value of silver to gold by law, which is to say by government policy, which is to say force. People were forced to treat gold as 15 times as valuable as the same weight of silver. This was not the exchange rate that they had set in the market prior to 1792 (the Act undervalued gold, which had a number of important monetary consequences which are outside the scope of this essay).

Whether they thought this was a simple matter of standardizing units called “dollars”, akin to a bureau of weights and measures, the law did much more than that. And the law created winners and losers. The losses were not so obvious as the peasant forfeiting his best produce to a greedy baron. But they were real, and the cause of the loss was a law which stood in contradiction to the Declared Principle, only 16 years earlier.

Another law which violated the principle was more obviously wrongful. In 1791, Congress created a monstrosity called the Bank of the United States. Investors put in the initial capital, buying 80% of its shares. The other 20% of the equity was bought by the US government. The government borrowed the money—$2M, or 100,000 ounces of gold—from the bank itself.

It needs to be said that nobody would take on the risk of forming a company and putting in 800,000 ounces or over 12 tons of gold, and then give away 20% to an outside partner who doesn’t pay cash, but instead gets the shares on credit which would probably be repaid only if the company became profitable.

Nobody would. Unless they are getting something in return. What is the one thing that the US federal government could give them, that they could not buy or build on their own?

What the investors in the Bank of the United States (BofUS) got, was an exclusive charter to do business in all states. All other banks were restricted by law—by force—to one state. This is a decisive advantage for BofS, and a crushing disadvantage to all other banks.

Wait… BofUS had a “right” to dominate all other banks… this is precisely the pre-American idea of rights. One has to think that some people, even back in 1791, knew that this whole thing flew in the face of the Declared Principle. They could not have known the full extent of the injustices that it would create. It would have been very difficult to foresee the full degree of anger and resentment it would breed. And I am sure nobody could have predicted that this resentment would lead to demands for more policies which would further violate everyone’s inalienable right to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

The process of repudiating such a principle begins with breaches, perceived as small in degree, by the enacting of bad laws. Bad law is sold to the people as helpful. Of course, it may help a small group which unjustly profits by the government’s violation of the alienable rights of everyone else. That group is often organized and very vocal, whereas the people are scattered and often don’t fight very hard.

Every breach of the principle emboldens the next profiteer to seek another bad law. Perhaps more importantly, it gives such bad-law-seekers a sense of moral entitlement. “Well,” they rationalize, if the government can give the bankers a monopoly then why can’t they give me a land grant to build a railroad?”

The federal government gave land to build a coast-to-coast railroad. The story was that it was for “national prestige.” While this did not make it illegal for any other railroad to compete, it blocked competition by another, subtler means. Lacking the free land, other railroad companies would not be able to justify the capital investment to acquire the land before laying any track.

The consequence, unlike the Coinage Act, should have been much easier to foresee. With government-granted monopolies in their territories, these privileged railroads could set arbitrarily high prices. And that’s what happened. Which led to the next phase.

After the phase when small breaches of the Declared Principle lead to not-so-small breaches, another kind of man springs into action. Unlike the cronies who just want the unearned, these people fear and loathe rugged individuals with independent minds. They are enviers. They don’t want to merely take what someone else has for themselves. They want to see it taken and destroyed.

The enviers openly attack the Declared Principle. They say it’s bad, it’s wrongful, it’s immoral, and revert back to the rationalizations that enshrined Feudalism for centuries prior to America.

They gain some credibility because, allegedly, the Declared Principle is leading to obvious cases of injustice. Each new case is more outrageous than the last. People begin to subscribe to the new (old) idea of an all-powerful government which is supposed to work for a greater good, if not the good of any individual. Some of them may be forgiven the error of believing the abuses and harm they see are due to the Declared Principle. Others are open in their desire to see the old chains clapped back onto humanity.

The term “unfettered” capitalism is telling. Some people really do want everyone chained in shackles.

The Declared Principle is gradually buried under heaps of propaganda. Public intellectuals begin to forget about it—never mind that the Declaration of Independence is still widely known, and the text of it is easily available, via an Internet search. More precisely, the old guard die one by one, and are replaced by youngbloods who promote the new (old) ideas.

The culture reaches a tipping point. Without the intellectuals to sustain an idea—even a powerful one which has led to so many great things—it withers away. An Overton Window develops. There is vigorous debate, but only within a narrow spectrum of socially acceptable ideas. As the Overton Window itself slides forward to the new (old) idea, it is all but imperceptible.

Yet even at this stage, there are many who see that something is wrong. But they are unlike those who saw the problems caused by the first waves of bad law. Those objectors were clear and specific in what they wanted. Unfortunately, what they wanted was a second wrongful law to compensate[1] for the effects of the first bad law. But they were coherent, and specific. They succeeded because they relied on the same principle that led to the first wrongful law. That is, they put people into a logical trap. If you accepted national exclusivity for a bank, or grants of tens of millions of acres, then how could you object to antitrust to fix it (or confiscation of the wealth of billionaires)?

The only way to argue against a wrongful law which compensates for a prior wrongful law is to argue against the original wrongful law. This is daunting, and it goes against the status quo. So the wrongful law mongers, the compensators, win bit by bit.

But at this stage, it’s not just one or two wrongful laws. It is whole lawbooks full of them. And not just a few people pushing them, it’s the entire Establishment from the philosophers, to the social thinkers, to the deans and professors in every social science in every university, it’s the school teachers, it’s the owners, editors, and writers in every media organization, and even movies and popular music is saturated with it.

Fortunately, many people still want to object to the new (old) laws and the progressive (ancient) ideological movement which promotes it. Unfortunately, they are trapped as the first objectors to the Bank of the United states were trapped. If they cannot or will not reject the entire ideology and the entire edifice of bad law, then they have scant means to object to yet more bad law, much less the bad ideology and the movement of enviers flogging it off on the public.

The Declared Principle now lies all but forgotten. Those who would oppose the progressive (atavistic) principle displacing it are all but intellectually disarmed. Their feeble attempts too often fall one or the other of two buckets.

One, they propose another wrongful policy to compensate for an older wrongful policy. This cannot lead us to rediscovered the Declared Principle.

Two, they cede the principle to the progressives (savages) but try to argue that it somehow leads to the opposite policy (which is often another wrongful policy to compensate). For example, a few years ago a case in Colorado came under the spotlight. A gay couple went into a baker owned by a Christian. They demanded he bake them a cake with an overtly gay theme. He refused, as it violated his faith.

But there was a wrongful law on the books. The law was not based on respect for everyone’s individual right to his own liberty and happiness. But instead on the opposite idea, that rights are attributes of group identity. This wrongful law attempted to grant to the gay collective, a “right” to have a cake baked. The law did not care that such a “right” means forcing someone to provide the cake, and hence is not compatible with the Declared Principle.

Instead of opposing this (and similar) wrongful laws, there was a populist objective: to find a gay baker and see if the courts would force him to bake a cake with an overtly Christian theme.

There is no justice in this, regardless of whether the mob attempting it believed it was justice. It was just seeking collective revenge to inflict on a fresh victim. It should be obvious that the gay baker had nothing to do with the Christian baker. Forcing the gay baker does not restore the rights of the Christian baker.

So what would it require to truly oppose progressive law (law of the jungle)? You have to re-read the Declaration of Independence a few times. Inalienable rights. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (plus speech and property).

And you have to understand why these are inalienable rights, and not the claimed rights of having a baker bake you a cake he does not want to bake, having food or medicine provided to you at someone else’s expense, successful companies smashed into pieces, and central bank with monopoly privileges to issue credit paper which everyone is forced to use as if it were money. The whole rotten edifice. The whole thing which is strangling us.

And you must advocate for the repeal of all of it. Not “reform”. Not “privatization”, meaning government-funded, government-dictated services offered by privately owned government contractors. The entire welfare-regulatory state.

Think of the daunting odds for the ragtag colonists to fight a war against a major power. Think of the independent minds who originally conceived of the right idea of individual rights, against the notion of claims to power which was predominant for thousands of years.

Unless you enjoy fighting what Tolkien called the “long defeat”, this is what you must do.

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[1] Compensation is doing the wrong thing, on purpose, purportedly to fix something wrong elsewhere that you cannot or will not properly correct. Like letting the air out of three tires, if you have a flaw. Or imposing antitrust law, if you have crony monopoly banks and railroads.