The phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence” comes from the writings of John Locke, specifically his long essay, “Concerning Civil Government,” although he wrote, “life, health, liberty and possessions.”
I have been unable to find out why Locke put those qualities in the order he did. I doubt it was purely coincidental, since without your life, your health, liberty and possessions (meaning property) mean nothing. And without any of them you certainly can’t be happy.
(Parenthetically, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” is a mistranslation. It comes from the Greek word “eudemonia,” which means “well-being” or “flourishing.” You gain it through “arête,” or excellence, which you obtain only through freedom. And that means, more than anything else, freedom from State oppression and coercion.)
What I find interesting is that Locke put property in last place, after life, health and liberty. This means that life and liberty are more important than property (which he defined as “mixing” your labor with something). Thomas Jefferson wrote about the same sequence – with property last.
Locke’s sequence makes a lot of sense, considering the fact one of the most serious problems this country had when founded is that some people were slaves, i.e., someone else’s property. Their rights to life and liberty were ignored, and in disappointing fact the courts (including the Supreme Court) ruled for several decades that slavery was legal and that slaves essentially had no rights, which meant they were sub-human.
As an aside, a fair number of slaves were white, although they were called indentured servants. They were treated worse than black slaves, who had to be treated fairly well since they were life-long investments. Indentured servants, on the other hand, were sometimes starved and worked to death, since they were short-term investments for a few years until their contracts expired.
In fact, the Supreme Court (and the lesser courts) consistently ruled that property was more important that life or liberty. These appalling rulings not surprisingly led to violence and death – and a lot of both.
During the early 1900s there was much violence between “capital” and “labor.” I am especially reminded of Matewan, in which coal company “police” evicted families from company housing (the miners were also paid in scrip, which could only be spent in company stores).
The chief of police, a 28-year-old ex-miner named Sid Hatfield, told these armed men they were under arrest. They told him he was under arrest, and violence broke out – the mayor was shot and killed, and Hatfield killed two of the “police.” Armed miners killed five more of the “police” and the rest retreated.
Over 20 miners were put on trial – and all were found not guilty by a jury of miners. This kind of violence was endemic in those days, all of it caused by the courts ruling that the “property” of the coal companies was more important than the life, health and liberty of the miners.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that courts often don’t rule correctly until violence forces them to. This is incompetence at its worst. But then, judges are lawyers, and most lawyers and therefore judges are clueless as babies about Natural Law.
Locke believed in Natural Law, and so do I: the law is discovered (like the laws of physics and chemistry are discovered), and not created. Natural Law works; created law is Political Law, based on force and fraud, and it leads to every kind of corruption that people are heir to.
When the difference between discovered law and false, created law is understood, it’s possible to predict the future, if only in a general way. The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Movement are eruptions based on people finally starting to understand, even if imperfectly, that the State is not their friend.
I also wonder how long it’s going to take the courts to do the right thing: declare the Federal Reserve Bank illegal, along with corporations (which are creations of the State), which exist only to crush competition and exploit everyone who deals with them.
For that matter, the Fed is a corporation, and it has control of the United States’ money supply. Do you really think this condition is for the benefit of the people – or for the one percent who stole, through force and fraud, forty percent of the wealth in the U.S.?
Bizarrely, corporations have the legal status of persons (although they’re legally artificial persons, as opposed to natural persons), a status that has shown itself to be horrendously destructive. As William Jennings Bryan wrote, “A corporation has no soul…”
For an example, the Boston Tea Party did not happen because of tax hikes. It was because the East India Company (a world-wide corporation) was given a tax break and a rebate of millions of pounds by the King, to run out of business its small American competitors. (Wal-Mart, anyone? – especially for the more foolish libertarians who support this corporate monstrosity.)
I refer to modern-day corporations as Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations. They run much of the U.S. government and they are not your friend. People who think they are their friends are deluding themselves.
I am reminded of the movie Blade Runner, in which artificial humans (replicants) are the creations of a corporation that is not only transnational, but transplanetary. The replicants, which the movie clearly points out have souls, are considered property by the corporation (and by State law) to be disposed of as the corporation sees fit. The replicants – no surprise here – don’t like that idea, and carnage, i.e. revenge, ensues.
When courts rule that property is more important than life and liberty, then people are not people, but things to be exploited, impoverished and enslaved by corporations, and if need be, exterminated. Unfortunately, this has been the history of the world.
Incidentally, those coal companies were corporations – and like all corporations they don’t give a damn about anyone’s life, health, liberty, property, or happiness. Except, of course, their own. They’ll flourish from their excellence in putting profit above all – but flourish you will not.
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