The American Revolution was unique among wars because it resulted in more than a mere change of government; it was a revolution of ideology.  New ideas had been taking root in America .  Ideas that said a man should be free to live his life as he so chooses.  Ideas that said that government is bound by the same rules of nature as everyone else.  The main idea, of course, was liberty.  The philosophy of classical liberalism drove men to leave their wives and children at home and pick up a rifle, well knowing that they might never see their loved ones again.  The United States of America was born, not so that one privileged class could better rule over other people, but in order that people could be free of such unjust government control.  Unfortunately, the spirit of the revolution was never brought to its logical end and has thus waned in America , to the point that now the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence pales in comparison to the tyranny people face today.

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force!  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."  George Washington's words embody the classical liberal attitude toward government: it is at best a necessary evil.  The only proper function of government, according to the Founding Fathers, is the protection of life and liberty.   The sovereignty of government is solely derived from a voluntary union of people, and the same natural laws of ethics bind the politician as much as the farmer or merchant.  This idea was a fundamental change from the foundation of governments in the past, which generally proclaimed the state to be the source of law. The individual holds the same natural rights whether a government exists or not, and the Founding Fathers sought to secure these liberties by explicit limitations on government. This was indeed a new experiment, but one that has proved that no matter how initially constrained tyranny is, so long as people mistake it as just, it will eventually grow larger.

It says a lot about the general temperament around 1787 that the Constitution, which was the framework for a more powerful central government than provided under the Articles of Confederation, required much effort on its supporters' behalf to pass.  Patriots such as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee vehemently opposed the Constitution, and eventually the famous compromise between supporters and opponents took shape in the Bill of Rights.  The most popular argument against including the Bill of Rights was that it was superfluous, in that the Constitution already provided no authority for violating the rights therein.  However, such rights as freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, and the right to a trial by jury were deemed too important to rest on interpretation, and they were provided for explicitly.

Clearly, much has changed since the Revolution.  Now, people need the government's permission to buy a firearm, and only those firearms that it permits.  Trial by jury is a farce, as juries are told they must not question the legitimacy of the government's law.  As "artists" defend their tax-funded paintings of feces-smeared crucifixes as freedom of speech, about half of the people's wealth is confiscated in taxation.  A central bank is the monopoly provider of fiat money, which it inflates to benefit bankers and politicians at the expense of the people.  And all the while, we are told to be grateful for the freedom the government allows us.  This downfall in liberty is the result of a shift in philosophy of the people from classical liberalism to modern liberalism. 

The modern theory of government, which goes almost unchallenged in all mainstream forums, is that government is a legitimate means for organizing society.  In the revolutionary era, debate concerned whether government was necessary at all for a certain function and how it would affect the people's liberties.  Now the debate is not if the government should be involved in something, but rather what it should be doing about it.  We hear on one side that the government should hold Social Security payments itself, and we hear from the other side that a portion of these payments should be invested in stocks.  But we rarely hear anyone submit that Social Security is not a proper function of government to begin with.  People are not asking the right questions anymore.

Concomitant with the increase of government power and infringement of the rights of the people has been the acceptance of democracy as a valid source of law.  Natural law has been replaced with majority rule.  The ramifications of such a shift in philosophy is that individual rights are less secure.  If law is dependent only upon the will of a majority of people, then rights are meaningless.

Natural law may seem an anachronistic concept to many people today who deride it as unscientific.  But natural law is precisely science.  Natural laws are those unchanging relationships that we observe in the world around us.  They are freely accessible to all and must be found by observation, reason, and experimentation.  The natural laws of forces and mechanics are included in the science of physics.  The natural laws of matter are included in the science of chemistry.  Likewise, the natural laws of human action are included in the science of economics, and the natural laws of man's proper action is included in the science of ethics. 

It is through the study of ethics, that is, proper and improper human action, that one can define what rights men have.  Ethics includes the code of criminality, and it is for this reason that the trial by jury was provided for in the Bill of Rights.  It is a check on the government's power, so that the power to interpret and apply the natural laws of ethics would rest in the people and not the state.  This can clearly be seen in the language employed in the eighteenth century: law was to be discovered, not devised.  On the importance of trial by jury, nineteenth century legal scholar Lysander Spooner noted, "The question then, between trial by jury, as thus described, and trial by the government, is simply a question between liberty and despotism.  The authority to judge what the powers of the government, and what the liberties of the people, must necessarily be vested in one or the other of the parties themselves- the government, or the people."  Spooner argued that juries must necessarily judge upon the justice of the law as well as the specifics of the case, and he thus supported jury nullification for such clearly unethical laws as the Fugitive Slave Act.

The modernly accepted notion of trial by jury, of the people solely judging according to the state's laws, is based on the idea that law is dependent on government.  If law is dependent on government though, so too are the people's rights, since ethics necessarily includes both criminal law and rights.  Of course, the government proclaiming itself to have a monopoly on proper ethical laws does not make it actually have it, but if it uses the threat of violence to back its claim, few people are going to argue.  Similarly, the government could proclaim that gravity no longer exists; it wouldn't be true, but it could use its power to stop scientists from conducting physical experiments to prove them wrong.

Once it becomes commonly accepted among the people that ethics are not discovered but rather legislated, no liberties can be held secure.  The questions people ask, for example, are not whether taxation is a legitimate means for funding services and projects, but rather what level taxation should be.  People ask what interest rate the central bank should lend money at, not whether a central bank should exist at all.

This regrettable shift in philosophy, from one where the rights of the people are provided in man's inherent nature to one where man's rights are subject to the whim of the majority, has occurred because of many reasons.  One is fundamental to the Constitution and government itself.  This is that no government can completely be based upon voluntary cooperation, because the Constitution is not a true contract.  It was ratified by a vote, thus contradicting its own statement of being based upon a voluntary union, since there were many people who did not wish to live under it.  With this beginning, it was only a matter of time before the logic of its ratification was applied to other areas.  If only votes were necessary for its ratification, then only votes were necessary to decide whether the government should build railroads in the West or war with Mexico .  The bottom line is that, no matter what the best intent of the Founding Fathers was, we cannot rely upon the Constitution or the present federal government to secure our liberties.  In a world where the prevailing thought is that liberties are government privileges, true freedom must be secured some other way.             

January 28, 2003