Bill of Rights Day – Woo hoo!

December 15, 1791. A group of mostly rich, white men created a document that enobled the human condition in a dramatic way by passing the Bill of Rights (maybe being rich, white and male don’t exclude one from doing good after all?).

While the U.S. constitution itself embraced the concept of individual sovereignty quite broadly, the ten constitutional amendments that form the Bill of Rights built on that foundation, guaranteeing that the people would be served by government rather than the people being subjects or servants of their government. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press and the rights of peaceful assembly and petition. Other amendments guarantee private property, fair treatment of those accused of crimes, such as unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from self-incrimination, a speedy and impartial jury trial, and representation by counsel.

The ideas embedded in the Bill of Rights have taken the world by storm over the past two hundred plus years, but I think that many Americans don’t really think about how radical a departure from the status quo this was for humanity. It’s certainly true that we don’t spend enough time discussing how these developments were the cause of the explosion of creativity, productivity and wealth creation that have ensued. It’s not a coincidence that since this time, humanity has doubled its life expectancy, increased the security of all people and has created a world which our founders would find incomprehensible. If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, and just arrived here I think he would feel as if he had landed on Mars. And from what I can tell, we’re just getting started. The next one hundred years will change civilization utterly yet again, and I see the seeds of this change in the simple little idea that human beings should be free to do as the please as long as they don’t impinge on other’s rights.

Sadly, we live in a time and regime where supposedly smart people don’t seem understand this basic truth. Instead, group rights and consequent government action impede your individual rights each day. The government now can punish you for hate speech or thought, takes private property for no good reason (it already owns over thirty percent of the land in the U.S.), and confiscates large chunks of your wealth for purposes it considers far more important than your sovereignty and freedom. Only libertarians are railing against these encroachments, while the Democrats and Republicans haggle over the details of your surrender.

You may think I’m being dramatic, but let’s take a moment and look at how government is acting in your behalf as you read this:

1. Militarism – We have over seven hundred foreign military bases operating in one hundred and thirty countries today.

2. Money – The Federal Reserve tosses the wealth of Americans in the garbage by inflating the currency (twenty three percent expansion in the past fourteen months – it’s simply unprecedented) and by giving trillions of capital to favored corporations and institutions.

3. Criminilization – Millions of Americans are in jail for offenses that have in no way impeded the rights of others. The Federal Criminal Code contains more than four thousand criminal offenses – so many that there isn’t even an accurate count of them, and many are so vague that the actual threshold for violating these laws rests solely in the mind of a U.S. Attorney. It’s more than doubled in the past forty years, and the pace of expansion of the Federal government is accelerating as we speak.

What better day to rededicate yourself to your’s and your fellow countrymen’s freedom? Take a moment and think about it – what more valuable possession do you have than your civil rights? Everything we know as freedom emanates from these ideas. They are worth protecting, hell, they are worth fighting and dying for.  Click here for more information on these rights and how they are being stolen from you.