The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on its meaning. For the first time in history, a country was founded on the idea that humans possess inalienable rights and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights. Prior to then, nations had been created through conquest and the growth and consolidation of tribal societies. Never had a country been founded on the principle that people’s rights should be protected by the government.
While the Founding Fathers didn’t implement a government that consistently protected individual rights and freedom, with slavery being the most obvious example, the founding of America was still an enormous achievement and something worth celebrating. Slavery is a gross violation of rights and should be morally condemned. Unfortunately, slavery was common in the 18th century and has existed throughout human history in all parts of the world. So the founders didn’t create slavery — they inherited it. They also created a political system that’s incompatible with slavery, hence the reason for a civil war that eventually abolished slavery.
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The fact that the founders were able to create a country based on the protection of individual rights at all is what should be remembered. Despite its flaws, the founding of a country based on the protection of rights was such a prodigious feat that it bears repeating: Never in the history of humanity had this been done. This is such an unprecedented accomplishment that it should be celebrated not just in America but around the world.
Why is this such a significant accomplishment?
The protection of individual rights is a fundamental requirement of human life. As demonstrated by Ayn Rand, rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning a person’s freedom of action in a social context. Rights protect freedom, and freedom refers to the absence of the initiation of physical force, the absence of compulsion, and coercion. This means, for example, people are to be free from murder and rape. More importantly, the government is banned from initiating physical force and violating rights, whether through regulations, welfare, or other controls. It means the individual’s life belongs to the individual and that we have a moral right to live our lives for our own benefit. Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So for the first time in history, a country was founded on the fundamental requirements of human life: the freedom to use our minds— our basic tool of survival — to think, act on our rational judgment, and produce the values our lives require. It made unprecedented increases in progress and higher standards of living possible.
The founders were also radicals because the ideas on which the nation was founded were radical. While most of the founders were Christians, the ideas on which the country was based weren’t fundamentally religious. The ideas on which America was based were grounded in the philosophic and scientific achievements of the Enlightenment.
This period saw a gradual reduction in the influence of religion, a result of the Renaissance. The Renaissance consisted, in part, of a rebirth of the ideas of the Ancient Greek philosophers, most notably Ancient Greece’s best thinker, Aristotle, who taught us how to base our thoughts and conclusions on logic and observation. This means the Renaissance was a rediscovery of the power of reason. Thinkers from the Enlightenment, such as John Locke, applied logic to understand the political requirements of human life. The founders then put those ideas into practice to create a nation.
So the radical ideas the founders embraced weren’t religious. Being religious was the norm in the 18th century. The new ideas the founders embraced were Enlightenment ideas. They were radicals for individual rights and freedom. If religion served as the basis for the founding of America, why wasn’t a free society created in the centuries before the Enlightenment, when religion had far greater power over people? It wasn’t because Enlightenment ideas were required to create a revolution for freedom and individual rights.
THE SPEECH AMERICA’S FOUNDERS DIDN’T PROTECT
Today, an understanding of the meaning of the founding is essentially forgotten. That’s why we have been abandoning the protection of freedom with greater regulations, taxation, and government power to violate rights in general.
To celebrate the great achievement of the heroes who were the Founding Fathers, we shouldn’t be abandoning the ideas on which this country is based. We should finish the job the founders started and more consistently implement the protection of freedom and individual rights. Ultimately, that’s the only way to create a more peaceful, prosperous, and benevolent society.
Brian P. Simpson, Ph.D., Professor of economics at National University in San Diego and author of A Declaration and Constitution for a Free Society.
