Post by RS Davis on Jul 5, 2004 4:47:24 GMT -5
Click here to read the whole thing!
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…”
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…”
...when he's around