The Road to Restoring Our Republic

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American Thinker:

September 17, 2016

The Road to Restoring Our Republic

By Shelby Williams

Why do we have a government? What is its purpose?

Our founding documents give us the reasons in plain English: to secure the unalienable rights of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" (the Declaration of Independence) and "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (the preamble to the Constitution of the United States).

 

In other words, our government exists to secure the liberty of its citizens. There is a reason why the word "Liberty" appears in both the Declaration and the Constitution: because liberty is the paramount moral directive by which one human being can interact with another. To rob another human being unwillingly of his time, effort, intellection, the fruits of his labor, or his very life is to violate his self-sovereignty and to do him evil. Governments were known by our founders to be the very worst violators of this principle, and so the founders set up our government to be the very basis for which self-sovereignty was to be preserved, which established our republic as unique in the whole of human history.