Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Equality

What the framers of the Declaration of independence and of the Constitution meant when they said that “all men are created equal” is that all people have an inherent impulse to live, to do things that are required in order to live, such as live in a place that’s sheltered from weather, and have food to eat, and all people also have an inherent impulse to think, which leads them to believe in things, such as various religions, and to say what they think.  People also have an inherent and equal drive to use what they have to express what they think.  Therefore property is a natural right.  In a state of nature there would be nothing limiting people’s access to those things other than their own abilities.  Since government is derived from the consent of the governed, and no one would give up their inherent rights, the government must respect inherent rights in order to remain a legitimate government based on the consent of the governed, and not become a tyranny.  All of those things can be put into three words, life, liberty and property, as Locke said, or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.  All people have an inherent right to those things, so the government cannot rightfully deprive people of them, and must respect everyone’s right to them.  Not only does everyone have a right to them, but everyone has an equal right to them, because everyone has an equally inherent drive to live, to think, and to use what they need in order to live.  The government cannot infringe on anyone’s life, liberty, or property, and cannot infringe on anyone’s equal right to those things, therefore all people have an equal right to equality under the law.  When the framers said “all men are created equal” they did not mean that everyone has an equal ability to live, think, or do anything else, because people are different and in a state of nature they would not have equal abilities.  They also did not mean that the government must implement policies that aim at achieving equality in people’s abilities.

            I agree with the framers that everyone should have an equal right to life, liberty and property, and that means equality under the laws, however I also believe that when some people have far more property than other people they can deprive those people of their right to life liberty, and property.  In order to protect everyone’s equal right to life, liberty and property the government must implement policies that limit the power of people who have a lot of property, and provide people who don’t have property an opportunity to acquire property.  Wealthy people can deprive the poor of their rights in several ways.  They can bribe government officials to implement policies that are in their own favor, thus violating the principles of equality under the law, and representation based on an equal vote, and campaign contributions also help politicians get elected, which violates everyone’s right to an equal vote.  Wealthy business owners can expand their businesses to the extent that they have a monopoly or an oligopoly over the market, and can thus determine the prices for everything and the wages that everyone receives, so that there would be an economic polarization between the rich and poor, and the poor wouldn’t have any opportunity to acquire wealth and start a business, thus the poor would be enslaved to the rich and the government would be totally controlled by the rich, would not recognize the equal right of the poor to life, liberty, and property, and would no longer be based on the consent of the governed.  Thus, in order to ensure equality under the law, the government must implement policies that provide everyone with an equal opportunity to live, acquire property, and be free.

            The Fourteenth Amendment was written because laissez faire capitalism had allowed the growth in the Southern part of the U.S. of a small class of wealthy landowners and a large class of slaves brought to the U.S. from Africa.  There was a lot of competition between the South and the non-slave west for the agricultural sector of the economy, and between the South and the North over trade laws, and by the 1850’s the situation had grown so bad that the South presented a threat to democracy, and passed the Fugitive Slave Law through the federal government, which prohibited anyone in the North from recognizing the inherent rights of slaves who escaped from the South.  The anti-slavery movement, which had existed for centuries, grew enormously with the addition of Western farmers and Northerners who believed that the Fugitive Slave Law was an infringement on their own freedom and on the rights of their states.  In the 1860’s they succeeded in electing Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and the South succeeded because they feared that Lincoln would emancipate the slaves.  Lincoln and the Congress decided that the continuation of the U.S. as a democracy was threatened by the inherent lack of democracy in the South, and that the succession of the Southern states violated the constitution, so they declared war on the South in order to force the Southern states to rejoin the Union.  During the Civil War Lincoln emancipated the slaves in the South, and after the Civil War Congress and the Northern States emancipated all of the slaves by passing the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.  In order to prevent the states from re-instituting a status of near slavery for African-Americans Congress and the Northern states then passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which established uniform requirements for citizenship, established guidelines for the apportionment of representatives, and declared that all citizens of the U.S. must be provided equal protection and due process under the laws by the states, and that the states could not deny to any person within their jurisdiction equal protection of the laws of the United States, and it gave the federal government the right to enforce the protections it provided.  Unfortunately putting civil rights into the constitution didn’t solve the underlying problem of laissez faire capitalism, and the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t enforced until the mid-twentieth century, and the states were able to re-establish a condition of near slavery for African Americans and others.  While the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t intended to advance the goal of achieving equality, it was intended to advance the goal of achieving equality under the laws, and it was eventually used for that purpose.

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