A brief note about politics

If you read PJ O'Rourke, and if you don't then shame on you, you'll eventually read this, about the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence "... life, liberty and pursuit of happiness"

What’s happiness doing in the Declaration of Independence anyway? The original phrase is “Lives, Liberties and Estates,” a brief catalog of man’s inherent rights that appears several times in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke was one of the Enlightenment’s foremost proponents of natural law and the rights it naturally bestows, rights that are so much a part of our nature nothing can take them away, and we can’t get rid of them. There were other important natural law theorists, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. America’s patriotic thinkers relied mostly on Locke because he argued the case for people’s right to dissolve their government. Also, he was easier to spell. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he was referring directly to chapter IX of the Second Treatise, where Locke says that men are “willing to joyn in Society... for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general name Property.” Every educated person understood the reference (moral philosophy not yet having been replaced by civics in the educational curriculum). Many educated persons must have wondered about Jefferson’s substitution of laughs for land.

The fact that property wasn’t mentioned in the Declaration of Independence still seems odd. The French revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man lists property second only to liberty, and the French revolutionaries had less respect for other people’s property (and less property) than did the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson may have been trying to convey the idea that our new nation wasn’t going to be a European kind of place. America wouldn’t be parceled into aristocratic estates kept intact by primogeniture and entail. Entail is a legal restriction on property, usually land, limiting its inheritance to linear descendants of the owner, and primogeniture is a further restriction that leaves out the girls in the family. Entail was necessary to preserve the power (formerly military, later economic) of the holders of the titles of nobility, which titles the U.S. Constitution would soon ban.

O'Rourke, P.J. (2010-10-05). Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards (pp. 28-29). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition. 

And a few pages later

Roger Pilon, chief constitutional scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, in Washington, D.C., believes there was another reason that property rights were handled with delicacy in the Declaration of Independence. Pilon concludes that Jefferson detected a flaw in the logic of Locke’s “unalienable” rights. Property has to be alienable, in a legal sense, or you can’t sell it. If we lived in a country where property was unalienable, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would still have the pocket calculator that they sold to raise the money to start Apple. Therefore when we go to work there’s nothing on the screen of the computer that doesn’t exist at the job we don’t have because we’re still farming the twenty-acre tobacco patch that our ancestors gypped the Indians out of for beads and trinkets the last time anybody was allowed to buy anything, in the reign of George III.

O'Rourke, P.J. (2010-10-05). Don't Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards (p. 32). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

None of this makes any sense.  First of all, the idea that a member of Government could have any familiarity with the founding documents of the United States, let alone write them, is bizarre.  I mean, I did learn in school that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but I just can't square my experience with American Presidents with the idea that Thomas Jefferson (a future American President) writing the Declaration of Independence.

But a further confusion is that the founding fathers of the United States of America were conversant enough with philosophical ideas to apply them in every day life.  If PJ O'Rourke is to be believed (never a sure thing) it would seem that Jefferson, Adams and the rest sat around and debated high-flung ideas like "liberty" and "property" and "inalienability".  Wut?

There aren't too many philosopher kings in the US today.  Politicians think and speak in sound bites.  No idea is expressed unless it can be done so in less than three minutes.   The chattering classes take those three-minute sound bites and cast thirty minutes of scorn on them, which in turn leads opposing politicians to extract three minutes of goodness out of those rants for the next evening-news-friendly quip.  The politicians are really only experts in getting elected and the wonks are really only experts in getting their stuff published.  None of them know "inalienability" from "illegal aliens".

There is one guy in Washington who's eager to expound on his philosophy: Justice Anthony Kennedy.  “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” You don't say?  I must have missed that part about "expressing identity."  It's stuck behind one of those penumbras that always seem to be getting in the way.

Our political leaders are simply fools.  And we're even bigger fools for putting them in charge.