Fundamentals

Over two hundred years ago our brave forefathers revolted against a king and the concept of European government. Today there are those in our nation who want to send us back there. They want us to be more like Europeans. Could it be that they do not understand what that rebellion was all about?

The United States did not become the greatest nation on the face of the earth in less than 200 years by accident. The founders were very familiar with European history. They had read Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu. We might call the founding of our nation “The Great Experiment.” The founders were aware of and critical of how governments operated in Europe. Powerful people, sometimes called kings, gained control and doled out rights to the people. The power was in the hands of a few. Men like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams recognized that certain rights are unalienable. They come from God and are granted by him to all people. Hence, The Great Experiment.

In his book, The Five Thousand Year Leap, W. Cleon Skousen explains how our founding fathers created a fundamental change in the way governments are established. For the first time in history God was recognized as the Creator by whom all rights are granted. Those rights are granted directly to the people. It is not the place of the king or any other governmental authority to grant rights. They are God given and unalienable. And, just as God is unchangeable, his values and his laws are unchangeable. The founders knew this and wrote our foundational documents with this in mind. They intended for these documents to reflect this fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between people and government.

The founders did have the benefit of a series of changes in the relationship between people and governments that provided a springboard for their great experiment. In 1215 AD The Magna Carta brought the King of England under the law. This was an important crack in the wall of unlimited royal power. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) further establish the need for the people to govern themselves. In 1689 The English Bill of Rights enumerated certain rights to which subjects of a constitutional monarchy were thought to be entitled. These documents, among others, provided our founders with evidence of a slow but definite change in the way people perceived government.

This focus on the rights of people and from whence these rights come suggested some very significant observations about government. First, government was expected to be limited and not absolute. People were not to be constrained by conditions of their birth. They had the right of self-determination. By reducing the power and purpose of government, they implied increased personal responsibility. Second, government was not expected to “take care” of the citizenry (nobles oblige), but rather to stay out of their way and to ensure that all had equal opportunity. The Declaration of Independence states, “that they (the people) are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Note that is does not say they have the right to be rich or to be successful or to own a house or to have a free education. The rights guaranteed are much more fundamental than that. In short, the people have the right to expect government to provide an environment where equal opportunity is a given. It is not expected to provide equal outcomes. The results are a function of individual effort and determination.

The genius of the founding fathers as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution is that of a new and improved relationship between the people and the government. The Constitution stipulates that government should “provide” for the common defense, but “promote” the general welfare. The word, promote means to support or encourage. It does not stipulate that the government should supply or bestow on the citizens any benefits for which they are capable of working and acquiring through individual effort. This establishes a requirement -- an expectation, of a small government. To keep the government small, the Constitution specifies those things for which it is responsible and clearly indicates those things for which it is not responsible. See the Tenth Amendment. Since all rights are given by God to the people, our Constitution, ratified by the several states for the people, limits government.

This Great Experiment has worked for two centuries. People from around the world flock to the United States because it is considered “the land of opportunity.” Why would anyone who understands that our strength as a nation lies in our founding documents want to change it to resemble the twisted, elitist model from which we fled over 200 years ago?