The Vision of the Founders

Our Founding Fathers had a pretty good idea what they wanted: freedom! Freedom to use their skills, time, and muscle to build something for themselves and their families. But they also had studied governments and laws and cultures, so they understood it was not enough to just have freedom. Perhaps even more important was the subject that was hardly ever on the minds of the ordinary citizen: the enlargement and preservation of freedom!

I wanted to do all I could to protect the unprecedented vision of the Founding Fathers who saw a new and unique way to sustain liberty for centuries: not a negative government founded on sufficient law and order to prevent chaos, but a positive one grounded in recognition that people will flourish when they are free to invest their capabilites in building something for themselves, something they personally want to build or do. Laws to control bad operators would be required, of course, but that was never the goal of this new revolutionary vision, it was an ancillary need, not a goal.

This vision, their vision, saw that people would sacrifice their own time, talents, and property to accomplish something grand; that they would, by this sacrifice, invest in themselves and their families when assured that they would be free to collect on those sacrificial investments and enjoy without fear the fruits of their labors.

This was their vision: a vision all but lost today in the rabble of today’s almost-totally-irrelevant dialogue. The confirmation of the efficacy of that vision was soon upon them. When the new US Constitution had been in effect for a few short years, everything was changing for the better. Disciplinary laws were enacted to discourage people from violating one another’s rights, but the energy of the new economic machine was provided by the cumulative sacrifices/investments of individual citizens. Prosperity rose all around, in technology, production, education, and the arts. It was a glorious time when the government was small and barely, but sufficiently, in operation.

The exciting and unprecedented Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which put the principles of the Declaration into effect, were soon overwhelmingly vindicated. Contemporary historians proclaimed the new nation the “Empire of Liberty” with explosive growth in agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, new colleges and academies, rising exports, financial stability, population, and the arts. Some examples:

• James Madison, “Father of the Constitution”, 1792: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort… This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” — Property, National Gazette, March 29, 1792.
• John Adams, 1787: “The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God… anarchy and tyranny commence.” — A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, 1787.
• Thomas Jefferson, 1801: “A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” — First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801.
• Alexis De Tocqueville, 1835: “I know of no other people who have founded so many schools or such efficient ones, or churches more in touch with the religious needs of the inhabitants, or municipal roads better maintained… Without doubt there is no other country on earth where people make such great efforts to achieve social prosperity,” and “There is no instance upon record of so prodigious a growth, or so rapid an increase in wealth and population as that which has taken place in the United States.” — Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter XVIII.
• Noah Webster, 1832: “The brief exposition of the constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government; and it is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.” — History of the United States, New Haven & Peck, 1832.

But the Constitution that produced this miracle was only the implementation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the actual source of the miracle.

How the Declaration Glorified the United Experiment

When the Thirteen Colonies united under the new Constitution, they already had their individual thirteen constitutions, which they modified as needed, a crucial acceptance of the new structure of the republic. That was not an arbitrary structure but one required by the Declaration.

The Constitution is often characterized in erroneous terms that reflect the agendas of their advocates. It was not founded on anything other than a recognition that a government, although founded on lofty and expansive principles, is nonetheless administered, applied, enforced, and either honored or corrupted by human beings with all their foibles, greed, and altruistic motivations. The Constitution was the implementation of the Declaration that defined a system of operatives in a single domain that would simultaneously advocate their own principles while denying some operations of other operatives. It was a model that mirrors the balance of nature and is described by the Temporal Rights perspective on operators and their operations. This brief description, while correct, is nonetheless only metaphorical.

Operators

Temporal Rights recognizes this remarkable fact right on the surface. The government as a whole and its agencies are not true operators; only the people who operate the government are operators. As you may recall, collections, like forests, are abstractions, have no self-existence, but are dependent on their self-existent components, people, and too often these are bureaucrats: the bane of today’s chaos. The problem is simple: it is human nature that as soon as one acquires a little authority, like owning a new exciting weapon or toy, they want to show off their supposed authority and therefore they are compelled to work that authority.

Never mind that they fail to separate themselves from their official titles and suppose they personally own the authority that actually belongs to the office. We might consider a law or policy that posts a small sign in every government office with the words: “Notice! The authority of this office belongs to the office itself and not to the office holder who has been assigned the stewardship of that authority.” My wife and I had a maddening experience with a bureaucrat who desperately needed that sign in his office.

We decided we would retire from our vocations on May 28, 2005, and to have something interesting to do during retirement, I had enrolled in a Land Surveying course at the local community college and had my degree in hand by that date. I discovered during that course or study that I loved forensic land surveying — the art and science of discovering where a property line was first drawn from local evidence: stones, pegs, fences, testimonies of long-time residents, etc. If such a line could be rediscovered, it would supersede any written document. It would require two years of employment in surveying before I could even apply to take the licensing exam. So I set up a website and hung out my shingle under the name “Corner Finder” and described the surveying services I offered to do under the direction of a licensed surveyor. Those descriptions set me up as a target for a trigger-happy state “enforcer” who appeared at my front door unannounced and demanded that my poor wife immediately disclose my whereabouts because I “had run afoul of the law by claiming I was a licensed land surveyor.”

I was to be called in and questioned. The bureaucrat accused me of pretending to be a licensed surveyor by offering services that required a license while I had none. That, indeed, was the law, but the same law provided that anyone could do anything so long as it was done under the direction and knowledge of a licensed surveyor — which I had, of course, mentioned on my website. We went around and around the same unlicensed-but-working-under-a-license bush several times. His anxiety to wield his sword completely overcame his reason. He would agree with me that my standing and advertising were legal, but then fasten again on the fact that I was offering services that required a license and insisted that I must be in violation. It was maddening to say the least. He was the operator who operated the collective we call “the government.”

I have told this story to emphasize the exceptional nature of our system of government under the Declaration, which proclaims “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 …”.

That statement is unique to our political foundation. No other nation on earth is blessed with this bottom-up vision of government authority, not the United Kingdom, from which we first came, and in no nation in Europe, and certainly no Eastern government. Many have elections, and even procedures for replacing government, but none have this explicit, fundamental principle that authority is derived from the consent of the citizens.

Operations

It is not lost on me that the United States has defied and redefined history in remarkably powerful ways, and I believe that is due to the fact of the just-mentioned bottom-up authority structure that permits, perhaps even promotes, the heart of the people to be expressed through the operations of their government.

The following is a historically unprecedented government operation: destroy, conquer, and completely subdue the enemy government, and then rebuild the nation and set it free.

When we had finally stopped the German and Japanese governments’ aggressions, we immediately began the process of making their citizens our friends and protecting those friends from a repetition of their recent tyrannies. I believe we had these capabilities for at least two reasons: free enterprise under the principles of the Declaration made us eminently prosperous in spite of the enormous cost of waging war simultaneously on two fronts, and the aforementioned bottom-up structure of our government.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt Germany and neighboring nations. Japanese culture and economics demanded a different approach that included the Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) and the broader reforms instituted under General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) from 1945 to 1951. This operator, MacArthur, operated with almost the absolute power of a dictator, which allowed him to control economics, politics, education, and even Japanese culture. MacArthur became a folk hero because he loved the people he ruled and served their needs while helping them stand on their own feet. The United States of America showed its true colors with these unprecedented heartfelt operations.

I believe the United States is presently engaged in the first stage of this subdue-and-rebuild sequence in Iran, and for exactly the same reasons, except that Iran’s aggressions have been much less dramatic than Japan’s Pearl Harbor and Germany’s Holocaust. Nevertheless, Iran’s government has, for decades, made it clear that its religion demanded a holocaust view of the “infidels” and would do far more than Pearl Harbor as soon as it could. The nature of the nuclear weapons demands that today’s confrontation with Iran be preemptive. They have, by decades of aggressive and terroristic operations, made their determination clear enough.

The Temporal Rights Declaration of Independence

Our Declaration of Independence is an unprecedented and therefore a treasured, even sacred, scripture for the guidance and preservation of the Republic which it created. It cannot be revered enough nor sufficiently preached.

One of the characteristics of Temporal Rights that has convinced me of its value and accuracy is its ability to voice every fundamental principle of our Declaration of Independence existentially.

Here is how that plays out. We hold these truths to be self-evident (existential), that all men are created equal (The Dependency Stack is blind to all considerations except those attached directly to natural rights.), that they are endowed by their Creator (baked into the physics of nature) with certain unalienable (existential) rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (The highest levels of the Dependency Stack). That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed (The Dependency Stack inherently casts government operatives as public servants of the people).