A 21st Century Declaration of Independence, Anyone?

A draft of the Declaration of Independence from the welfare state.

Our country’s 250^th anniversary has shone much needed light on the moral blueprint for our nation, the Declaration of Independence. As I was pondering this epochal document over the weekend, and being inspired by Bradley Thompson’s excellent article Independence – Forever!, my thoughts went to what an updated version for the 21^st century would look like? Fundamentally, the intent of the original doesn’t need revision, but what if we replaced the grievances against Britain’s King George III and Parliament with grievances against the modern welfare state that endemically violates our individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? After all, the individual rights violations experienced by the colonists pale in comparison to the yoke of taxation, regulation and redistribution that modern Americans labor under.

I asked my trusted legal assistant, Gemini, for a draft that I subsequently revised. I realize no geographical option exists for separating ourselves from the welfare state; we’re stuck within the borders of the U. S. of A (my apologies to seasteaders and free cities promoters whom I wish success in their efforts, however, the proof is in the pudding). And I realize most Americans are welfare state “loyalists.” But why not have some fun with the idea—with serious undertones. Because, if not reversed, the statist trajectory we’re on will not bode well for the future of freedom, liberty and the respect for and protection of individual rights.

Settle in, review the draft, and submit your feedback in the comments. Should it be rewritten in more modern language suited to a younger audience? Should it be more explicit in discussing the immorality of the welfare state? This is your opportunity to partake in an imaginary, virtual Continental Congress—and then ask yourself if you would sign it, pledging your life, your fortune and your sacred honor for the cause.

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IN CONGRESS, [insert date], BY THE REPRESENTATIVES OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS RESPECTING AMERICANS, IN VIRTUAL CONGRESS ASSEMBLED

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for productive, rational individuals to dissolve the political bands which have bound them to an extractive system of collective dependency, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and the requirements of human survival and flourishing entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all individuals are created equal, that they possess unalienable individual rights, that among these are life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, minds must be free, and human action must remain uncoerced. That the only moral justification for government is the protection of individual rights from physical force and fraud. 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 freedom and safety.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute statist despotism, it is their right to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future protection. Such has been the patient sufferance of independent, productive citizens; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.

The present welfare state has a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having the ultimate objective the establishment of an absolute tyranny of the collective over the mind, the labor, and the property of the individual. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The welfare state has:

• instituted a system of institutionalized extortion, seizing the earned rewards of the productive under the guise of altruism and the public interest, thereby treating the individual not as an end in himself, but as a sacrificial asset for the collective.

• penalized achievement, capability, and wealth creation, treating the virtues of industry and innovation as moral crimes to be taxed, while subsidizing stagnation and dependency.

• erected a multitude of new offices, sending swarms of unelected regulators to harass our businesses, dictate our peaceful contracts, and eat out our substance through endless mandates and compliance penalties.

• perverted the concept of rights from a protection against physical coercion into a corrupt claim on the labor and property of others, fabricating false entitlements to housing, healthcare, and income at the point of a legal gun.

• weaponized the currency through centralized manipulation, inflating away the savings of the thrifty to fund unbacked state liabilities, eroding the foundational property rights of every citizen.

• broken the natural link between effort and reward, eroding the moral fiber of society by punishing success and rewarding failure, fostering an artificial class conflict between those who produce and those who consume without producing.

• monopolized and degraded the vital functions of science, research, and healthcare through monolithic federal entities, substituting political consensus for objective truth, open inquiry, and free-market discovery.

• central-planned the economic choices of consenting adults, blocking energy production, stalling industrial growth, and strangling infrastructure under the banner of modern economic and ecological collectivism.

• monopolized and politicized the education of the young through state-run schooling, forcing parents to fund the systematic subversion of their own values and violating their fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.

• combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our foundational liberty and unacknowledged by our natural law; giving its assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

- for imposing arbitrary tariffs and taxes on us without our genuine consent;

- for depriving us in many cases, through regulatory tribunals, of the benefits of objective trial by jury;

- for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable economic liberties, and altering fundamentally the forms of our civil society.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most principled terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A system whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant collective, is unfit to be the ruler of a free, rational people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our collectivist brothers and sisters. We have warned them repeatedly of attempts through our legislatures to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our shared moral potential. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common humanity to disavow these immoral usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our productivity and peace. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of reason. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity of holding them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in coercion, in freedom friends.

We, therefore, the sovereign individuals of this emerging free society, appealing to the supremacy of reason for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the rational nature of mankind, solemnly publish and declare, that this society is, and of right ought to be, free and independent; that we are absolved from all allegiance to the welfare state, and that all political connection between us and the apparatus of collective dependency is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent individuals, we have full power to contract freely, produce unhindered, accumulate property securely, trade voluntarily, and to do all other acts and things which sovereign persons may of right do.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of objective reality and the power of the human mind, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.