It is pitiful that many Americans do not recognize or understand that Thomas Jefferson has brilliantly captured the essence of America in the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson stated, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator to certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men ….” .
In other words the purpose of government is to secure man’s natural rights. Note that natural rights occur in nature and they require nothing from your fellow man for you to enjoy them. The government’s role is to provide the conditions under which the citizens can enjoy their natural rights.
The basic problem with government is to make it strong enough to accomplish its’ function of protecting natural rights while at the same time keeping it from expanding into other functions that it should not be doing.
The reader can reflect that natural rights are equally available to everyone, are mutually compatable, are not depleted when used and require no effort from other people for you to use exercise them. Natural rights are the only ones that can and should be guaranteed by government..
When government tries to add rights beyond natural rights such as the right to medical treatment, housing, education, retirement and others the results are always bad.
First, citizens must be forced to fund these rights since they don’t occur in nature and that infringes on the natural rights that the government is really supposed to be supporting.
Second the added rights always turn out to be very faulty, expensive and divisive with a reduction of freedom and economic well being for everyone and the weaken the recipients.
I like to call these additional rights “free lunch rights” because they don’t really exist and the harder you try to create them the worse off everyone is.
As we stand here this Fourth of July, about three-fourths of the federal budget is devoted to trying to provide these unnatural, free-lunch rights and trying to do things that were prevented originally by the constitution. Each day the government is trying to take on new functions that the founding fathers tried to prevent and American citizens are suffering greatly from it.
If the founding fathers could see us today they would be pleased to see that their constitution was able to keep the government in bounds for as long as it did. They would also be saddened that in the last 80 years the government has broken out of its restraints and is now running rough shod over the American people and their freedoms.
Our founders would also be saddened by the fact that so many Americans do not know or understand what it is that they were trying to accomplish or why the changes that have occurred are so destructive of their well being.