Wherever you look in our founding documents, speeches, or correspondence, you find the idea that happiness comes from acquiring and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor, and from the conditions of limited government that make it possible.
Article 2 of the New Hampshire Constitution, minus the unnecessary addition of characteristics like sex or skin color (in 1974), states that,
All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.
The government exists to ensure that they can pursue these things based on their own skills and merit, and with as little interference from anyone, especially the government.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights notes that,
“the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
They are not separate things, and the government has no mandate to define them because it could not. Any homogenized manifestation of force ignores that each person has their own idea of the work they would do and what success, prosperity, and happiness look like.
The revolutionary and founding generations did their heroic part in bequeathing to us this legacy of freedom. So abundant is this gift that to live up to it is the most fulfilling thing we can do. It is to confirm with our lives what George Washington declared in his First Inaugural Address, “that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” The daily activity of a free people is the “pursuit of Happiness,” the activity of being good sons and daughters, good parents, neighbors, secretaries, teachers, artists, farmers, plumbers, mechanics, business owners, and citizens. As Benjamin Franklin’s homely Poor Richard put it: “Pitch upon that course of life which is most excellent, and Custom will make it the most delightful.”
We have an entire political party, and a troublesome chunk of another, that cleaves to the notion that the general government is tasked with taxing and regulating whatever it chooses to achieve these ideas, but it can only ever please itself.
Less, when it comes to government and happiness, is always more.
If we go back to NH Article 2, the (presumably lawful) acquiring, possessing, and protecting of property is at the core of life, liberty, and happiness, and is an inherent right. A problem the petty despots, mostly Democrats, try to undermine with Article 3, which states that,
When men enter into a state of society, they surrender up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to ensure the protection of others; and, without such an equivalent, the surrender is void.
But Article 3 can’t contradict Article 2 or 2a: “All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property, and the state,” which is the enumerated extension of the happiness derived from protecting what you legally possess.
Article 3, of course, refers to matters of mutual benefit in both directions, without which the surrender is void. In other words, you can’t deprive me of property to fund lesbian clog dancing or, in truth, the financing of anything that isn’t public, like roads, other infrastructure, policing, fire departments, clearing snow on public roads, or necessary staff to manage or pay the people who do that work.
Public schools only benefit the parents and/or children who attend and only for so long as they do, and only if they learn something that benefits the community, which increasingly they do not – a product that appears to result in happy administrators but not anybody else.
The real revolution was the idea that you pursued a life by choice or circumstance, absent the abrasive influence of your government, free to keep the fruits thereof for all but a few shared common interests, and if you were unhappy with those, you could vote accordingly (sometimes with your feet) – as long as you did not vote to take other people’s property for your own benefit.
That last line is where we’ve been in America for some time, with an entire political party standing on not just the practice but the idea that you have a right to someone else’s labor. But any “thing” that requires someone else to pay for it can’t be a right. No constitution, state or federal, suggests that, and yet here we are, surrounded by thieves and liars negotiating the terms of our continued surrender.
Mr. Trump has tried to shrink government and done a better job at cutting departments and staff than anyone before him thought he’d have to compete with Calvin Coolidge, who would see our modern excess for what it is: an assault on natural rights and an abrogation of Constitutional responsibility.
The problem is, as it has been for too long, that people don’t know or understand the thing or the benefit and have been too easily cowed by the “community” into thinking someone else not only has a right to our property that maybe they do too.
“All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.”
Your labor is the means to your happiness, and no one else’s, and the cure is to convince or remind people that voluntary giving to address social problems for which government was not created is the answer. What we have now is government as a social problem, creating more of them and then intimidating people into forcible taxation for what amounts to the good of government at the expense of everyone and everything else.
And no one should be happy about that.
