Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Fireworks in Ripon Friday night.

Saturday is, as you know, my favorite national holiday not named Christmas, in part due to the un-Christmas-like weather.

I have some pleasant Independence Day memories, such as celebrating our nation’s 200th birthday riding in a boat on one of Madison’s lakes with my father, my brother, my uncle, and my uncle’s golden retriever, Brandy, who may have been the nicest dog ever. Depending on when one counts a day as ending (as in at midnight or when you go to bed), that may also include July 4, 2005, which concluded with the birth of our daughter, Shaena, July 5 at 2:28 a.m. (Using the latter definition of the end of the day, July 4 ended at about 4 a.m. July 5, when I fell asleep in a chair in my wife’s room at Aurora Health Center in Oshkosh.)

The Independence Day weekend (when it is actually a weekend, that is) is a good time to actually read the Declaration of Independence. (Independent of all the weird Fs replacing the Ss, that is.)

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.

From the Declaration of Independence, one war and 11 years of deliberation came the U.S. Constitution, created “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

The Declaration of Independence is based on the grievances of those the signers represent against their overseas monarch and King George III’s subjects’ taxation without representation. But it, and all the documents resulting from it, is a realization of the concept of natural law — those “certain unalienable rights” not coming from government, but from a higher power. The Constitution was created in a time when the memory of heavy-handed government still was fresh in its writers’ and signers’ memories. Still, the original Constitution is really about the mechanisms of the federal government — Congress, the presidency, the courts and the states. There are some protections of our rights — a process to get rid of bad presidents, bans against suspension of habeas corpus or ex post facto laws — and a way to amend the Constitution.

That amendment process was necessary within four years of the enactment of the Constitution because of the original Constitution’s lack of protection of individual rights — freedom of expression, to own arms, against unreasonable search and seizure, to have a fair trial by jury, against “cruel and unusual” punishment. (That also includes the usually ignored Ninth and 10th Amendments — “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people,” respectively.) That memory of how the British handled their subjects is the reason for all the negative rights — that is, our protection from the federal government’s doing things to us.

If those rights were only collective rights, those rights wouldn’t mean nearly as much as they do as individual rights — you yourself have the freedom of expression, not just “the people.” You yourself have the right to a fair trial and to be protected against the government’s subjecting you to cruel and unusual punishment.

This is why I get skeptical when I read about the rights of society being more important than the rights of individuals. That is inferred in such wide-ranging areas as seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws, “sin taxes,” and discussions about President Obama’s health care reform plan, whatever it is.

The American reports on a university research project comparing tobacco companies with food companies:

[The authors] grudgingly acknowledged that personal responsibility and freedom are values cherished by Americans, but “they obscure the reality that some of the most significant health advances have been made by population-based public health approaches in which the overall welfare of the citizenry trumps certain individual or industry freedoms.” In other words, the government knows better than you do how to feed and raise your children.

On that subject, the Business and Media Institute’s Dan Kennedy points out:

The answers to the admitted flaws of American health care are not to be found in socialism and government bureaucracy, control, transfer of responsibility, and confiscation of earned income. If it were to achieve equality of care, care would be equally horrible; poor quality, rationed care for all, at substantially higher costs.

The right answers lie in the opposite direction. The American direction. Getting health insurance out of both government’s and employers’ hands (like all other insurances), creating unrestricted competition, private and individual ownership, mandating having a minimum level of coverage (just as is done with auto insurance or home insurance if if the consumer borrowed money for the purchase) if we must, and giving equal tax deductibility for all. That way lies self-reliance and responsibility, not dependence on the socialist state.

I wrote earlier this week on the need for additional rights amendments to protect our economic rights, which are interdependent with our political rights. The Constitution was written, of course, when most of the things government does now weren’t even a dream of whatever passed for a big-government advocate in the late 18th century. (For an eye-opening exercise, read Section 8 here.) Not only is it incontrovertible that the more the government does, the worse it does anything, but the more the government does, the less freedom we have, collectively and individually.

Individuals can make their own decisions best for themselves — where to live, which profession to pursue, whether or not to open a business. (The same applies to businesses, which have to serve individual customers, not apply one-size-fits-all products or services.) Individual freedom is one of the founding principles of our nation. Every time we drift from that concept — and there's a lot of drift these days — we're all worse off.

Happy Independence Day.