About

The purpose of this blog is to apply the concept of individual rights to political issues affecting my life.

The quality of my life depends in large part on the legislation passed by my elected government.  In order to secure a future in which my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are protected I must take the time to defend those rights.

I spent four years of my adult life living in back country Costa Rica without electricity or running water.  Living close to nature in a rural community taught me a great deal about man’s relationship to nature and his rights in society.

Nature provides people with raw materials, such as rocks and trees, but nature does not provide the values required to sustain human life ready-made.  Nature does not automatically fulfill the human needs of beans, cloth, rubber boots, machetes, water hoses or penicillin.  People must understand natural processes and create value from nature if they want to live, or they have to trade for someone else’s work.

I also observed that living in a community does not automatically increase security, facilitate trade or promote well being in general.  I was able to recognize, through the wisdom of Enlightenment thinkers, that in order to benefit from living in society man must respect the lives and properties of his neighbors and his neighbors must do the same.

As human beings, we must study to understand and work to manipulate the environment for our survival and benefit.  No matter what continent or time period, mankind has worked to improve his condition by the use of his rational mind.  Since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, the rate of improvement has increased as has been demonstrated by the upward trend of life expectancy.  “For example, in 1541, the English life expectancy was 33.75 years.  It rose and fell within a limited range – but in 1761, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, it was still merely 34.23 years.” By 1871, nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence, shortly after slavery was abolished and while John D. Rockefeller was revolutionizing the newly born oil industry, life expectancy was 41.31 years, an increase of 22.4%.  “The industrial era initiated a gradual but steady march upward regarding English life expectancy, which is currently 74.7 years on average for men and 80.2 years for women.”¹ The increased life expectancy was, in large part, a result of mechanical technology, medicine, cleaner environment, healthier food, and cleaner water.  It was later observed that the productive explosion, called the industrial revolution, was preceded by the unprecedented freedom brought about by the Enlightenment thinkers.

In order to see the parallels between freedom and prosperity one must first examine the origins and definition of individual rights.  The revolutionary idea of individual rights really began to grow out of Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.  In 1690, John Locke recognized that freedom was man’s natural condition and therefore it was his right. (The following is my translation.)

To properly understand political power we must derive it from man’s natural state.  Man is unbounded by other men and free to order his actions and dispose of himself and his possessions as he sees fit.  He is only bounded by the laws of nature.²

But amongst men, freedom is not license to do whatever one pleases.  Freedom under the law grants liberty from the inconsistent, uncertain, unknown or arbitrary will of another man.  Man has the right to do anything not explicitly prohibited by laws.  Freedom from absolute and arbitrary power is so important that man cannot preserve his life without it.³

Thomas Jefferson further expanded and clarified the principle of individual rights in the Declaration of Independence, 1776.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —

The ideas of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson have remained true in respect to the rights of man and the purpose of government, but they lacked a worldly reason as to why man had those rights.  It was not until more recently that Ayn Rand gave us deeper insight and clarity into the origin of rights and the consequences of protecting or ignoring rights.

There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.⁴

It is doubtful that either John Locke or Thomas Jefferson could have foreseen the prosperity that followed from the implementation of their ideas.  They observed that man had to be free, not because he would be more resourceful, but because by man’s nature –as God created him– it was right for him to be free.  Only with the hind sight of the Industrial Revolution could we use reason to discover the links between the amount of freedom in a society and its prosperity.

1) The production of values, that which preserves life, requires judicious planning and invested time and energy.

2) If time and energy are to be invested, then the investor has to be certain of the outcome.

3) An indispensable component of certainty comes from having the freedom to act on your plan and keep the profit.

4) Freedom to action, for the common man, was possible only after individual rights began to be understood and protected.

A political system organized around the protection of individual rights is proper for man because of his nature.  He is rational and capable of certainty, but he is not omniscient.  There is no omniscient force, god, government, or committee of experts.  In order to benefit from his nature as a rational animal, each man must be free to use his own judgment to choose the appropriate course of action to guide his life.  If he is forced to act according to the non-omniscient will of others, he can no longer live as a proper man—he must obey instead of think.

Mark Dohle

References

¹ Andrew Bernstein, The Capitalist Manifesto (University Press of America, 2005) p.120

² John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. 1980) p.8-9 Due to the difficulty modern readers encounter with Locke’s language, this is a paraphrase.

³ Ibid, p.17 The para

⁴ Ayn Rand, Man’s Rights The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 93.