Of Politics and Principles

The debate and development of public policy in the greatest republic in history has been my career. Discerning between good and bad ideas, detecting valid and erroneous arguments, is part of my daily job. The success of a republic, however, requires that all citizens have competence in judging right and wrong in the debate of public issues. All do not have to be experts in all the details of every issue for a republic to work, but they do need to be able to judge enough to know to whom they should entrust the duty to represent them and attend to the details of governance—and to know when to withdraw that trust.

With public debate becoming increasingly confusing but also, apparently, increasingly prone to slogan and devoid of substance, with emotion seeming to take up more space than information, with error and deception playing a progressively more prominent part in discourse, how do citizens whose careers are more focused on producing goods and services and the things that make an economy work figure out who is right and who is wrong? Without leaving their day jobs for politics, how do they choose the right people whose lawmaking can dramatically affect everyone else’s day jobs, as well as their hearth, home, and health?

I believe that the answer is that every citizen of the Great Republic, as Winston Churchill called the United States, needs to be familiar with and dedicated to the founding principles of the Republic. The consideration of every public issue should be based upon an appeal to this foundation. That approach may not resolve every issue, but it will ensure that we do not stray very far into error. In fact, for most of the key issues of today an appeal to the founding principles would quickly disperse the foggy talk that makes up so much of contemporary public debate.

Those founding principles are embedded in our Constitution, but they are perhaps most clearly presented in the Declaration of Independence. I present a few examples of founding principles that would serve as reliable guides in considering such issues as healthcare, financial regulation, and taxation and public spending.

The Declaration begins by invoking “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Our concept of government rests upon the idea of truth and laws that are as immutable as God Himself. Trust that those who say that truth is relative and law is founded on whatever man or Congress or the Supreme Court want it to be are leading you far astray, regardless of how attractive a ribbon they put around their poisonous policy packages. If law is relative, then government is a mere matter of the will of whoever can sway the crowd today. There is no protection for the minority—and all will find themselves in a minority of some kind whose rights need protecting.

The Declaration, in words that hopefully all Americans still find familiar, proclaims the “self-evident” truths that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” Among those immutable truths on which our system of government was founded is the focus on the individual, that the individual has worth, has importance, has rights that cannot be taken away. These rights can be usurped by tyrants—and at the time when the Declaration was written and approved by the representatives of the new nation nearly all of mankind labored under tyrannies—but that does not eliminate these rights, it only violates them. Our nation was created to protect the rights of the individual. Reject politicians whose formulas are invoked to violate your individual rights, especially when they justify the taking of individual rights by an appeal to benefiting the group. Remember, at the head of every group is a leadership who in fact enjoys and wields the “rights” of the “group” as the spokesmen for the group. They derive their power, vampire like, from the blood of the members of the group, from individuals whose rights are violated to empower the group leadership.

In direct relationship to these individual rights, the Declaration explains, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .” Withhold your consent from those who would seek to govern with plans that rather than protect your rights would limit your rights. Resist those whose plans assert that government should be given the decision over your daily choices. Resist those who assert that all must be “regulated” and who believe that finding that something “is not regulated” is a justification to regulate it, that is, to impose government decision-making over the power of your individual decisions. Your right to choose is the reason the government was created, to protect your individual rights, not usurp them.

On reflection, it is all too easy to find regulations and programs in our government and laws that are inconsistent with the Declaration and the founding principles of our government. The immutable rights remain, however they may be currently violated. That should alert us to the danger in which we live, but it should not be cause for despair. Rather we should be motivated, as were our nation’s founders, to reassert the principles on which our nation was founded. The tools for doing so, embedded in our Constitution, are still available to us.