Setting up the Holiday and Invoking Our First Principles for the Common Good
By Brian R. Wright

Recently, while in attendance at the Oakland County, Michigan, meeting of Campaign for Liberty (C4L), master of ceremonies, Dennis Marburger, stated that the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred on August 2, 1776. I had forgotten this little acknowledged fact, but truly this is a significant day. Because this is when those in the assembly actually put their ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ on the line. Perhaps more important to ‘the course of human events’ than political independence from England is the Declaration’s famous statement of what have become known as American First Principles—and, further, the foremost universal statement of INDIVIDUAL rights:[1]

1. Equality before the law
2. Natural rights of the individual
3. Government’s sole purpose to secure these natural rights
4. Government’s powers deriving from the People
5. People’s direct authority to monitor and control government, even dissolve it

AKA American First Principles. These are the foundation of all valid laws for ‘our people’ … and by extension any other peoples willing to assert such inherent natural rights. [For ‘rights’ one may read ‘fundamental freedoms.’ I’m not going to quibble over terms. Like Ayn Rand, I’ll stipulate that a right is the moral claim of “freedom of action in a social context.”] The point is our individual rights—no matter who we are—are inviolable and we the people are in charge of all public servants whose job is solely to secure these rights. They screw up, we step in… it is a legal necessity and, indeed, we are morally and civically obliged to do so. Continue reading →