What Went Wrong? Identifying Root Causes
Negotiating With The Warden—From Master To Serf
Part 1 of 5
 

America is an institution and its citizens are inmates here. It was not planned and did not start that way. The change is neither recent nor generally understood. In fact, folk wisdom states exactly the opposite. “America is the freest nation on earth.” Almost anyone will confirm it. Ask Ross Perot. He says that the citizens own this great nation and that public servants work for them. That sounds good but is not strictly correct.

The truth hides behind a facade. You will find keys to a clearer view in the U.S. Constitution, beginning with the Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Involuntary servitude and slavery are forbidden within the jurisdiction of any state of the United States. Now search the Constitution from beginning to end and all its amendments—you will find not one word about voluntary servitude. Bondage is permissible when voluntary.

Almost all Americans are willing slaves. They abdicate freedom because it entails responsibility. This is a human characteristic, not limited to contemporary Americans.
 

Moses leads the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage, across the Red Sea and into the wilderness of Shur. The people come to him complaining. They want him to provide them with water and with food, to tell them where to go and what to do. He tries, with limited success, to teach them the Law, to tell them that they are free, self-controlling individuals, accountable for their own actions.[1]

Like the children of Israel, Americans shun personal responsibility. The evidence is pervasive. People blame their misbehavior on society, poverty, the schools, the churches, the police, the government, their genes, alcohol, drugs, refined sugar, on anyone or anything but themselves. Somehow, collective authority reduces or eliminates personal responsibility. Think of a drunk driving home from a bar. He does not believe that he will do $500,000 damage between the bar and his house. Besides, it is not his problem. The state pressured him into getting a driver’s license and buying insurance. It must be the state’s problem. Strange as it may seem, in a way, he is correct. In America, the game of life plays under much different rules than those most people imagine.

Learning to play the game requires studying the laws of the land, a formidable task. An individual is subject to various international, federal, state and local laws. Constitutions, treaties, laws, statutes, rules, codes, decrees, edicts, regulations and ordinances numbering in excess of two million apply to all Americans every day. Full knowledge is presumed, ignorance being no excuse for transgressions. Isn’t this a weird system for a society having serious problems with just ten commandments?

It gets worse. Many important principles are nowhere written down. Do not worry if you missed a day or so of your high school civics class; these rules were not taught there. This unseen, unspoken, unwritten, private, consensual law changes from hour to hour and even with the fashions of the times. It is founded upon natural law or natural rights and judges are bound to take ‘judicial notice’ of it in their decisions.

Americans know that something is wrong. Rot and disintegration proliferate. More of the glue that binds together families, neighborhoods, cities, states and the nation dissolves with each passing day. The situation is extremely complex, yet almost everyone believes that they understand and can fix the problems. Most enthusiastically share their solutions, often starting with the statement, “There ought to be a law …”

But if laws alone solved problems, surely there are enough of them now on the books to produce the desired results. Clearly, the search for a solution must be extended beyond the mere adoption of conventional statutes with their illusion of social improvement.

Originally, laws were based on natural rights. In the Declaration of Independence the Founding Fathers declared, “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.” These were practical men with little propensity for trivial philosophical discussions. They avoided argument by avowing a rudimentary truth “to be self evident” and went on to build a nation on the ancient common law.

The Law of Moses proclaimed, “Thou shalt not steal.” Rewritten in a positive way that statement becomes, “All humans have an absolute right to their property.” “Life” is the most fundamental property of the individual. It does not belong to the king or to the state, to the society or to the tribe, but only to one’s self. “Liberty” is the right to the fruits of one’s life, to one’s own labor and experiences. “The pursuit of Happiness” is a poetic description of the right to lawful acquisition of worldly things. In a single statement the Founding Fathers laid upon the grounds of natural rights a solid foundation for a new system of government.

Natural rights are gifts from nature. Some say they are granted by God or “Nature’s God,” the expression used by the Founding Fathers. Most exist at birth and arguably even before. All humans, simply because they are human and by their identity alone, possess “certain unalienable Rights.” Discovery establishes their existence, not creation. Of necessity, the list, claimed by some authorities to number in the hundreds, remains forever incomplete. Some new natural right might be discovered any time, a fact acknowledged in the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
 

The laws of nature apply the world over and consequently so do natural rights. Dominating authorities may deny individuals the freedom to exercise some of their “unalienable rights” but they are powerless to remove them. Neither can they by edict nor legislation turn water into wine or repeal the law of gravity. However, political authorities can and do extend the concept of natural rights into the area of privileges.

Civil rights are privileges created and granted through edict or legislation by a benevolent government. People frequently confuse civil rights with natural rights, categorizing both as ‘human’ rights. Indeed, sometimes the differentiation may be difficult. Most high school graduates, when asked to list a dozen natural rights, cannot name twelve and ordinarily include ‘voting’ among those correctly designated. Voting is a civil right available to individuals conforming to arbitrary criteria such as a minimum age requirement or living within a specified geographical area for some stipulated period. It cannot be a natural right—babies do not vote; God does not call elections.

The lawyer-politicians, for their own purposes, continually grant new civil rights. Typical lists, similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights, include: the right to a well-paid job, the right to a decent home, the right to adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right to proper medical care, and the right to a good education.[2] The newest civil rights extend beyond conventional mundane economic matters into the realm of emotions. Americans now have civil rights to a choice in lifestyles, to compassion, to politically correct treatment and to be free from social and cultural stress.

To distinguish between natural and civil rights, check the source. Ask yourself a single question about any so-called rights. “Who is to provide them?”

“If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged ‘right’ of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.”[3]

Our Founding Fathers built the structure of government upon natural rights, proclaiming “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The chains of natural rights subordinate and bind government to moral law.

But the concept of natural rights died, sacrificed on an altar of civil rights. The knife used by the high priests to cut the heart out of the American system of government was forged by judges in the federal courts from a natural right. The right involved was that of private contract. For over a hundred years it was hammered by the civil law on the anvil of the Constitution’s commerce clause.
 

1 Exodus — Chapters 14, 15, 16 
2 Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967, New American Library, New York, NY), p. 320 
3 Ibid., pp. 324–325