America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Despite the flaw, those are my favorite lines from Katharine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful.”

America is beautiful. But why? What makes it beautiful? And what could make it even more beautiful?

What makes America beautiful is its founding principle: individual rights—the idea that each individual has a moral prerogative to take the actions necessary to support and further his life (the right to life); to act in accordance with his own judgment, free from coercion (liberty); to keep and use the product of his effort (property); and to pursue the values and goals of his choice (the pursuit of happiness).

What could make America more beautiful is for Americans to better understand and protect rights.

Are rights real? Is there evidence to support them? If so, what is the evidence? And are rights inalienable—such that neither individuals, groups, nor governments can revoke them or take them away? If so, how do we know it? What evidence supports this?

Some Americans, including the nation’s founders and religious conservatives, believe that people have rights because a “Creator” or “God” endowed us with them. For instance, the Declaration of Independence states, “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.” Although this conception of rights served to establish America, it has not served—and cannot serve—to sustain America. This is because there is no evidence for the existence of a Creator, much less evidence to support the notion that rights somehow emanate from His will.

Since the founding of America, positivists, utilitarians, materialists, postmodernists, and other critics of rights have taken advantage of this lack of evidence. They have mocked the idea of inalienable rights—rights that exist prior to governments, rights that, as the Declaration notes, governments are instituted to secure. The idea of “rights anterior to the establishment of government,” wrote philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is “rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” Why? Because, Bentham insisted, rights “are the fruits of the law, and of the law alone.”1 The idea of inalienable rights, wrote philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is “one with witches and unicorns.” Why? Because no one has provided evidence for such rights; thus “every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.”2 Yuval Noah Harari says that “rights are just like heaven and like God.” Why? Because, like heaven and God, there is no evidence for their existence. “Take a human, cut him open, look inside,” quips Harari. “You find blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find any rights.”3

The idea that inalienable rights are nonsense on the grounds that no evidence supports them is widespread among today’s philosophers and intellectuals, and it is undermining the very foundation of America. If there is no evidence for the existence of rights that precede governments, then what we call “rights” are not really rights but rather laws or permissions granted by governments. On this conception of “rights,” governments create laws, and the laws dictate the “rights” and “non-rights” of the people who live under those governments. In short, the government’s laws simply are the citizens’ rights.

If rights are merely permissions created by a government via law, then no legal action can violate rights. Whatever the law permits is a right; whatever it forbids is not.

Taken seriously, this means that in National Socialist Germany, the so-called Aryans had a right to throw Jews into concentration camps and gas chambers because Nazi law permitted it. In the antebellum South, white people had a right to enslave black people because their states’ laws permitted it. And in Islamic theocracies, the mullahs and “morality police” have a right to hang gay people from cranes or throw them off rooftops—and the right to punish women for exposing their ankles or for having been raped—because their governments’ laws permit it.

Thankfully, America is nowhere near such horrors today. But what is to stop us from moving in that direction? What is to stop America the beautiful from becoming America the terrible?

Consider the following, and ask yourself whether Americans and the American legal system are treating rights as moral principles that limit governments—or as “fruits of the law” such that governments may do whatever their laws permit.

• When, under civil asset forfeiture laws, governments seize a person’s cash, car, or other property without convicting him of a crime (as federal, state, and local governments do), does this violate his rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When the Food and Drug Administration forbids patients from contracting voluntarily with their doctors to receive medications or treatments that could save their lives (as the FDA does), does this violate the rights of patients and doctors—or uphold rights by enforcing the law?

• When a city or state forbids people from starting a small business—say, selling food or braiding hair—unless they first obtain an expensive government-approved license or permit (as many cities and states do), does this violate the rights of peaceful people to earn a living—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When governors order businesses to close for weeks on end, thus destroying or damaging the livelihoods of the business owners and their employees (as many governors did during COVID-19), does this violate individuals’ rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a government passes a law requiring people to use others’ preferred pronouns (as some states and localities have attempted to do, and many people want them to do), does this violate people’s right to freedom of speech—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a state levies a special tax on residents above a certain net worth (as supporters of California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act propose), does this violate their property rights—or protect rights in compliance with the law?

• If Americans elect politicians who nationalize industry, abolish private property, and subordinate individuals to the collective or “common good” (as various intellectuals, college professors, and politicians advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would it protect everyone’s rights because it’s the law?

• Alternatively, if Americans elect politicians who make biblical law the law of the land, punishing blasphemy, homosexuality, and religious dissent (as religious people who take biblical law seriously advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would everyone’s rights be upheld because religious dogma had become political law?

If the only “rights” human beings have are those established by a government’s laws, then governments are not and cannot be limited by rights. If so, the American system of government, which is based on inalienable rights, is based on nothing at all. It is a sham. Consequently, there is nothing to stop the land of liberty from becoming just another tract of tyranny.

The bad news is that the idea of rights as “fruits of law” is precisely what today’s journalists, legal scholars, and college professors are teaching the rising generations—and have been for decades. To wit:

Harvard-educated E. J. Dionne Jr.—a longtime Washington Post editor and columnist, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University—insists in both a Washington Post op-ed and a commencement speech to graduates of the University of Pittsburgh: “Absent a government committed to the protection of rights, there are no rights.”4

Law professors Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein—respectively professors at New York University School of Law and Harvard Law School, both of whom previously taught at the University of Chicago—write that “Under American law, rights are powers granted by the political community.” Indeed, Holmes and Sunstein clarify, this means “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action”—such that even “the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards” exists only insofar as a government’s laws and legal machinery protect people against such practices.5

Raymond Geuss—an American political philosopher who has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago—writes that a right is a “construct of a particular legal system,” meaning that its “real locus” is not in human nature but in “positive legal codes.” To claim otherwise, he says, is to “delude yourself” and to engage in “puffery or white magic.”6

This is what American college students and Americans in general are being taught about rights: They are merely the laws that governments pass and enforce. To defend inalienable rights—and thus the very foundation of America—against this fundamental and expanding assault, we need an evidence-based, demonstrably true conception of rights.

The good news is that rights are real. They exist. But, like many things that exist—such as justice, honesty, sarcasm, and logic—rights are not perceivable: We cannot see, touch, taste, or hear them. Rights are highly abstract principles that arise from and depend on various other ideas and conceptual integrations that ultimately are grounded in facts we can perceive.

To understand the source and nature of rights, and why they are inalienable, we must identify the facts and ideas that give rise to them and connect them to perceptual reality. The American philosopher Ayn Rand did just that.

Rand conceived of rights as identifications or recognitions of certain facts—namely, the social conditions required for human beings to live together peacefully.7 And when you see rights this way, far from being nonsense, they make perfect sense.

Rand observed that if and to the extent that people, groups, or governments use physical force or coercion against an individual, the individual cannot act fully as his life requires. The principle of individual rights is the recognition of this fact. And the specific rights—such as the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—are recognitions of this same fact regarding specific spheres of concern. For each right, there is a principle, which is the recognition of a particular fact—and a corresponding moral prerogative to act accordingly, which is what it means to have the right in question.

The right to life, on this view, is the broadest and most fundamental right. The principle here is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to take all the actions necessary to support and further his life while refraining from violating the same rights of others (more on this below). To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from acting as his life requires, he cannot act fully as his life requires. For instance, to live, a person must produce goods (or services) and either use them or trade them with others. (The only alternative is to survive parasitically on others who produce life-serving goods.) If a “slave master” or socialist government or theocratic regime forces him into a cotton field, a concentration camp, or a noose, he cannot live fully as his life requires. He cannot live a fully human life. This is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or like “witches and unicorns”; nor does it depend on or have anything to do with an alleged Creator somehow endowing people with rights. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact about the world and human life. It is a truth grasped by means of reason. And for someone to possess the right to life is for him to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: as his life requires.

Likewise, the right to liberty is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to act on the judgment of his mind, which is his basic means of living. To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from doing so, he cannot act in accordance with his judgment. If he judges that he should start a business braiding hair, and if a government physically stops him from acting accordingly because he doesn’t have a government-authorized license to braid hair, then, to that extent, he cannot act on his judgment; he cannot act on his basic means of living; thus he cannot live fully as a human being. Here again, to possess the right is to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: A human life is a life guided by the judgment of one’s own mind. And here, too, this is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or in any way dependent on a Creator. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact. It is a product of reason.

Similarly, the right to property is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to keep and use the goods he produces. To the extent that other people coercively stop him from doing so, he cannot keep or use his property; thus, he cannot live a fully human life. For instance, if he farms for a living, and if the government takes 30 percent of his earnings, then he cannot use that 30 percent to sustain or further his life. And that 30 percent represents real time, effort, and resources that he spent earning the money. To forcibly take this money is to forcibly take that portion of his life—by retroactively converting his work into involuntary servitude. This is neither “nonsense” nor “puffery.” It is a recognition of a fact—a product of reason. And individuals possess the right to property in light of this fact.

Finally, the right to the pursuit of happiness is the recognition of the fact that for a person to pursue the goals and values of his choice, he must be free to do so. To the extent that other people force him to act against his chosen aims, he cannot act in accordance with his chosen aims; thus, he cannot live fully as a human being. If a girl chooses to remove her headscarf and dance, but the “morality police” arrest or kill her for doing so, she cannot pursue the goals and values of her choice; she cannot live a fully human life. Likewise, if someone chooses to take psilocybin to overcome a psychological problem, and the “medication police” arrest him for doing so, he cannot pursue the goals or values of his choice; he cannot live a fully human life. In light of the corresponding observation-based principle, human beings have the right to the pursuit of happiness: the moral prerogative to pursue the goals and values of their choice.

Each of these rights—to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—applies to human beings as such, on the grounds that they are humans, that they are individuals, and that acting in accordance with the judgment of their own minds is essential to living human lives.

Such fact-based rights exist in that we can observe the facts that give rise to and support the respective principles. And such fact-based rights are inalienable in that they preexist governments and cannot be revoked: One cannot revoke a basic fact of reality or human nature.

Of course, other people and governments can violate an individual’s rights—and frequently do—by initiating or threatening physical force against him, thereby stopping him from acting in accordance with his own judgment. But other people cannot revoke or remove an individual’s rights. The only person who can remove an individual’s rights is that individual himself. And the only way he can do so is by violating the rights of others—that is, by initiating or threatening physical force against them and thus throttling or thwarting their ability to act in accordance with their judgment. If and to the extent that a person initiates physical force against others, whether directly (e.g., assault or rape) or indirectly (e.g., fraud or extortion), he—of his own accord—forfeits his moral prerogatives, his rights, in proportion to his violation of the rights of others. A rational, rights-protecting legal system adjudicates rights violations and punishes rights violators accordingly.8

Rand’s theory of rights is based on her broader moral theory, rational egoism, wherein the factual requirements of human life constitute the standard of moral value—the standard by which we can measure the rightness or wrongness of chosen human actions. This standard, too, is supported by perceptual observations and conceptual integrations of reality and human nature.9

There is a great deal more to the observations and integrations that undergird, support, and give rise to inalienable rights. But the foregoing indicates how such rights are derived from and grounded in perceptual reality—facts we can see.

Seen in this light, rights are neither endowments from God nor grants from governments. Nor are they “nonsense upon stilts” or like “witches and unicorns.” Rather, rights are recognitions of facts about human beings and human nature—namely, that for human beings to live fully as human beings, they must be free to act in accordance with the faculty that makes them human: their reasoning minds.

This evidence-based conception of rights resolves the deficiency in the God-based conception expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Rights are real, but not because God gave them to us. They are real because they are identifications of the factual requirements of human life in a social context. With this understanding, Americans can move past the otherworldly, passivity-laden prayer “America! God mend thine every flaw”—and embrace the earthly, agency-driven mission: America! We the people will mend thine every flaw.

Yes, we can mend America’s every flaw. We can do so by grasping and upholding the rational, observation-based principle of inalienable rights. And when we do, we can call it America the rational. That will be beautiful.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Editor’s note: This is part one of a three-part adaptation of a chapter from Timothy Sandefur’s book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, reproduced with permission of the Cato Institute.

When Thomas Jefferson showed his draft Declaration of Independence to the other members of the “committee of five,” on June 22, 1776, his colleagues were probably impressed. The 33 year old Virginian was the youngest member of the committee—in fact, the second-youngest member of the Continental Congress—and he had arrived with two documents in hand: a reply he had written to a disingenuous “peace” proposal that Prime Minister Lord North had sent over to the colonies, and a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which Jefferson had written two years earlier, summarizing the American colonists’ complaints against Parliament. They were impressively enough. But Jefferson’s latest production was a brilliant exercise in concise argument and controlled passion. After a dozen years of protests and remonstrances against London’s treatment of the colonies, the Americans had finally had enough. This time, they would not be petitioning King George for help, let alone pleading for respect from Parliament—whose authority over the colonies the Americans entirely denied. Instead, this new Declaration would be a political testament to the world by a nation that had attained its political maturity.

“When in the course of human events,” Jefferson began, “it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, and to assume among the powers of the earth. . . .”

The Premises

Jefferson’s opening lines struck the committee’s chairman, John Adams, as close, but not quite right. For one thing, referring to Americans as “subordinate” seemed unduly meek. As for the word “independent,” while noble enough, it was less striking than the more forthright “separate.” Thus Adams, along with the other committee members—Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—made several small changes to Jefferson’s vocabulary and the specific complaints listed in the document before they submitted the completed draft to the entire Congress for further editing on June 28. Since then, many scholars have examined each word of the Declaration trying to decipher just who changed what—with notably little success. However the committee of five made its decisions, the version they turned over to Congress began:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In the centuries since independence, many intellectuals have quarreled with Jefferson’s invocation of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Some have even argued that classical liberal natural law theory was not really an animating factor in the revolution, and that Jefferson added these phrases only to make the uprising palatable to foreign nations, particularly France. The conservative historian Russell Kirk, for example, claimed that “the Francophile Jefferson” included this passage as a ploy to persuade Parisian philosophes to ally with the Americans.1 According to Kirk, natural law played no real role in the revolution; the Patriots were actually seeking to preserve the colonies’ traditional autonomy, not to vindicate the radical doctrines of equality and freedom. These assertions echoed the views of South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who in an 1850 speech defending slavery tried to brush off the Declaration’s language about equal rights by claiming it was “inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.” The revolution really centered on the “breach of our chartered privileges,” Calhoun said. Classical liberalism had “[no] weight in constructing the governments which were substituted in the place of the colonial.”2

These claims were nonsense. In 1776, France was governed by an absolute monarch who considered himself the representative of God on Earth, and ruled over his people with a degree of absolutism that exceeded the pretensions of George III by an order of magnitude. Nothing would be less likely to attract Louis XVI’s admiration than to announce that every person has inherent rights that no just government may contradict, or that kings are servants rather than masters of the people. Nor was the Continental Congress particularly careful to ensure that King Louis even saw the Declaration. Although Congressmen certainly hoped for foreign support, they were so negligent in sending an official copy to France that it only arrived in November, well after newspapers had already reported it—hardly an oversight they would have made if their foremost concern had been impressing the French.3 In any event, the colonists had been asserting the natural law principles of equality and liberty since at least the “Boston Pamphlet” of 1772, published by Samuel Adams and his Massachusetts colleagues. Kirk’s idea that the Declaration included such language only to obtain “sympathy in France’s climate of opinion” was absurd.4

As for Calhoun’s assertion that those principles played no role in the new state governments, the first line of Virginia’s Bill of Rights is enough to disprove that. Virginians pronounced in that document—adopted a month before the Declaration of Independence—that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Parliament’s refusal to honor the colonies’ charters, and its insistence on legislating for Americans directly, did initiate the crisis with Britain in 1764. But by the summer of 1776, London had made clear that those charters were not worth the parchment they were inscribed upon. That forced Americans to take the drastic step of abandoning their “chartered privileges” and asserting their human rights, instead.

In any case, as Thomas Paine later observed, the distinction between natural rights and the rights of English tradition is to some degree illusory. “The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity,” he wrote. American Patriots may have appealed to precedents of their seventeenth-century ancestors, but those ancestors had appealed to precedents from the fifteenth or fourteenth centuries, and so on back in time. “If we travel still farther into antiquity,” Paine argued, “we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man.”5 In other words, the cherished rights of English legal tradition must rest upon the nature of man, rather than mere collective agreement—and those objective and universal rights must always underlie all political institutions if those institutions are to be legitimate. Now that Britain had declared Americans ineligible for the protections of British law, Americans had little choice: they could only lay claim to universal principles and rights.

While there was nothing new about Americans asserting their natural rights in 1776, there was a novel phrase in the Declaration’s opening paragraph: its reference to “one people.” This was what is now called “the American people,” a phrase seldom used before the imperial crisis. Before the 1760s, colonists rarely even called themselves “American,” and would hardly have considered themselves the same “one people” as the residents of other colonies. Now, however, the Declaration announced that they had forged a national identity.

That bothered Thomas Hutchinson. The disgruntled former royal governor of Massachusetts, now living in London after being relieved of his governorship two years earlier, published a pamphlet published in November 1776 responding to the Declaration point-for-point. He started by attacking the idea “that the colonies are one distinct people.” That was an “absurd notion,” he wrote.6 Americans were and always had been Britons. That was an ironic claim from a man who once said it was “impossible the rights of English subjects should be the same, in every respect, in all parts of the dominions.”7 But in any event, he was wrong. Americans truly had become a distinct people by 1776. Over the century and a half since colonization started, they had developed unique characteristics and mores, as well as distinct systems of government and even religion. To use the language of a later age, they had “grown apart.”

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;

Jefferson originally wrote “sacred and undeniable,” but changed this to the more succinct “self-evident,” possibly at Franklin’s suggestion. Ever since, scholars have disputed whether equality and liberty actually are self-evident truths. Much of this quarrel results from confusion over the term “self-evident.” The phrase refers, in the words of philosopher Thomas Reid, to “propositions . . . which appear evident to every man of sound understanding who apprehends the meaning of them distinctly and attends to them without prejudice.”8 The fact that throwing a lit match into water will extinguish it is self-evident, for instance, because anyone with enough experience to know what these words mean will need no demonstration to prove it. But rules can be self-evident, too. The principle “innocent until proven guilty,” for example, or “two wrongs don’t make a right,” are also self-evident. Self-evidence is therefore not the same as what philosophers call “analytic truths”—a phrase that refers to conclusions logically implicit in the premises of a syllogism—but neither is it the same as the experimental demonstrations of the physical sciences. The fact that gravity is proportional to mass is not a self-evident truth. The fact that rocks fall to the ground when dropped is.

The Golden Rule is self-evident, because it requires no investigation to justify it beyond an ordinary acquaintance with human nature. Because we know that every person is an essentially self-directed, self-responsible, self-interested being seeking to survive and thrive, we expect others to resent being harmed and appreciate being helped, just as we would. Consequently, the basic principle of interpersonal morality—to treat others as one wishes to be treated—is self-evident to anyone sufficiently acquainted with human beings to form a mature judgment. The principle that “all men are created equal” is equally self-evident; indeed, it is implicit in the Golden Rule. No ordinary adult is marked out as so far superior that he is entitled to run the life of another in the same way that a parent is (self-evidently) responsible for his child’s welfare. And because each person is responsible both to himself and others, each is equally entitled to freedom.

By “created equal,” the Declaration obviously does not mean that people are equal in terms of talents, skills, or character, or that they should be made equal through the redistribution of wealth or by compelling some to labor for others. It just means that nobody is entitled to dictate how others may live. Put another way, “equality” is fundamentally connected to “inalienable rights.”9 The natural equality that characterizes human nature is the possession of the same basic freedom. People are born into unequal circumstances—some rich and others poor. They may use their rights in ways that make them unequal—some may work hard and prosper, while others invest their resources foolishly and suffer. None of this is relevant, however, to the Declaration’s contention that they are equally entitled, indeed required by nature, to manage their own lives.

Jefferson modeled the equality clause on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by the celebrated elder statesman George Mason, which observed in its first section that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Striving for concision, Jefferson realized that Mason’s phrasing (“equally free and independent”) could be collapsed into “created equal,” and that “by nature” and “inherent” are technically redundant. He also moved the term “inalienable,” which occurs elsewhere in the Virginia Declaration, into this opening sentence.

“Inalienability” was crucial to refute Thomas Hobbes’ argument that when people establish government, they surrender to it all of their rights. Hobbes concluded from this premise that rebellion against government is never justifiable, even if rulers abuse their power. Although few in America or Britain openly embraced Hobbes’s philosophy in the 1770s, some did contend that rebellion against government was never acceptable. Many Quakers and Anglicans in particular argued that Christianity required passive obedience in all circumstances. Others claimed that as a legal matter, the colonists had surrendered their claims to self-government when they accepted royal charters in the seventeenth century and acquiesced in Parliament’s legislation in the years after that. By asserting inalienability, Jefferson replied that the colonists could not be bound by any previous agreement that intruded too deeply into the liberty to which everyone is entitled.

That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

Jefferson’s decision to modify John Locke’s traditional trio of rights—life, liberty, and property (or “estate”)—has led to confusion over the years. Some have asserted that substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property” signaled that property is less important than other rights. But Jefferson and his colleagues viewed the right to buy, sell, own, and use property as indispensable to personal freedom. The real reason Jefferson used “pursuit of happiness” is more subtle.

In writing the Virginia Declaration, George Mason had identified the basic rights as “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” a phrase that was more comprehensive, but also wordier. Steeped in the ideas of such philosophers as Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cicero, who held that “happiness” or “flourishing” is the purpose of existence, Mason, like Jefferson and Adams, thought the ultimate good of human activity is the well-lived individual life. The reason to acquire and possess property is that it helps one flourish. Thus, in simplifying Mason’s philosophical assertions, Jefferson was saying that people have specific rights because they have the more general right to pursue happiness.

One aspect of this right that scholars too often neglect is its foundational connection to economic freedom. Most Americans in 1776 owned few or no tangible assets; especially immigrants, who often reached American cities penniless, as Franklin had in Philadelphia more than fifty years before. Immigration to America surged in the mid-eighteenth century, with perhaps 400,000 Europeans arriving between 1740 and 1770, many owning nothing but their labor.10 Locke considered labor a kind of property, and the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith agreed in Wealth of Nations, published just four months before the Declaration. “The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” Smith wrote. “The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands.” To deprive someone of the right to use his labor to earn a living “in what manner he thinks proper” is therefore “a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him.”11 Jefferson had been among the most outspoken critics of British trade restrictions, arguing in his Summary View that mercantilism unjustly deprived workingmen of their right to earn a living. In short, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” refers to freedom of opportunity. It encompasses the principle that people have the right to use their liberty to obtain property and thereby enjoy happiness in peace.

Another subtle but important innovation in the Declaration’s phrasing is its use of the word “liberty” in the singular, rather than the plural form. In ancient legal documents such as Magna Carta, kings gave the people lists of specific “liberties”—using the plural because the monarch was granting only a finite number of rights. Reversing this idea, the Declaration asserts that people naturally enjoy “liberty”—a word that literally means an infinite number of freedoms—and that government’s powers, not individual rights, are finite and limited.12 Jefferson himself later defined “liberty” as “unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” with the caveat, “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”13 Whereas ancient legal documents presumed that the king owned all rights and could parcel them out as he chose, the Declaration views the individual as presumptively free, with the people giving the government its powers piecemeal. As James Madison put it, in an essay contrasting Magna Carta with the Declaration: “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty.”14

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The notion that government is an essentially contractual relationship, in which the authorities derive their powers from the consent of the governed, was commonplace in eighteenth-century British thought. Even Loyalists thought the king and Parliament derived their powers from the consent of the governed. They simply argued that Americans were represented in Parliament, in an abstract sense, or that by emigrating to America, their forebears had surrendered the right to vote.15 The Declaration sets that debate aside. It invokes consent as the justification for the right of revolution. Since government officials are servants, not masters, the people have the right to alter or abolish unsatisfactory governments, and to create whatever alternative they think will better serve their needs.

There’s an important limit, however. Only “just powers” derive from the consent of the governed; the people have no right to give their government unjust powers. Just as they cannot rightly commit robbery or murder, so they cannot deputize the government to do so. That explains why the Declaration’s closing lines assert that the new states may only do “acts and things which independent states may of right do.” The principle that government’s powers are cabined by the universal principles of justice runs throughout the Declaration’s text, which refers to justice more than to any other value except liberty.16

Consent therefore plays a dual role, both justifying and limiting government power. As Jefferson later said, the people “are inherently independent of all but moral law.”17 The people cannot consent to tyrannical or despotic governments, even if they were so deluded as to try. Nor can they excuse evil government actions by “consenting” to them. Implicitly recognizing the risk of the “tyranny of the majority,” the Declaration sees democracy as an instrumental good—not as an end, but as a means to achieving a higher political value: the preservation of individual freedom. As Jefferson later said, while “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable,” and must recognize that “the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect.”18

The Declaration’s implicit prioritization of rights over democracy has proven to be one of its most controversial features, as critics claim that its individualist vision elevates “selfishness” over “community” or “the common good.” But the Declaration recognizes that the preservation of each individual’s freedom is the common good, at least as far as the political realm is concerned. It is the only political ambition that, when achieved, imposes no injustice upon some people for the gratification of others. Nothing about this fact is inconsistent with acknowledging the importance of community, the value of helping the less fortunate, or the need to work together to address social ills such as poverty or pollution. In fact, working to remedy such problems can often be more rewarding in terms of personal “happiness” than the acquisitive and productive activities of the marketplace. But the Declaration recognizes that most of these issues are better addressed through “civil society”—the realm of private charitable and social organizations, which operate on the basis of personal choice and voluntary cooperation—than in the political realm, which is governed by compulsion.

The Declaration’s recognition that preserving individual freedom is the highest political good—the only truly common political good—does not, as communitarians sometimes charge, make it a manifesto for so-called atomistic individualism.19 Rather, it recognizes that social problems are often too complicated to be solved by government, and that efforts to impose political solutions on social problems usually backfire, worsening the original problem and violating the rights of the innocent. Thus the best way to address them is usually through private institutions—charities, churches, trade organizations, and the like—for the same reason that the best kinds of interpersonal relationships are those we freely choose. In short, the Declaration prioritizes the individual’s right to pursue his or her own happiness, while recognizing that this pursuit is often most fruitful in the company of others. That explains why it ends with one of the strongest forms of community bond imaginable: a mutual pledge of life, fortune, and sacred honor.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Jefferson said that he consulted no books or pamphlets when writing the Declaration, but that when his colleague Richard Henry Lee—who had officially offered the motion to declare independence—saw Jefferson’s draft, he “charged it as copied from Locke.”20 If so, Lee had a keen eye. In 1689, Locke phrased his rationale for revolution in quite similar terms. It was “evident in itself,” he wrote in the Second Treatise that “all mankind” are created “equal and independent,” and that although they “are more disposed to suffer, than [to] right themselves by resistance,” the people have the right, “whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy [their] property,” or “endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over [their] lives, liberties, and estates,” to “resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, such as they shall think fit, provide for their own safety and security.”21 In the Treatise’s closing chapters, Locke responded to those who feared this principle would lead to frequent rebellions. Revolutions, he explained, are not justified by “every little mismanagement in public affairs,” or even “great mistakes” by rulers. Instead, the people have a right to rebel only when “a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way,” prove that the authorities are seeking “to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power.”22

Jefferson had employed markedly similar wording in his Summary View—written only five years after his intense, self-directed crash-course on political theory—and now he used it in the Declaration.23 Of course, these parallels are no surprise; by the summer of 1776, Locke’s wording had been quoted and paraphrased so often in declarations, petitions, and newspaper debates, that most Patriot leaders could recite it by heart.

Although Locke’s arguments for revolution were well known on both sides of the Atlantic, they remained controversial in the 1770s. Legal scholar William Blackstone thought they could justify rebelling against a king, but not against Parliament, which “has absolute, sovereign, and uncontrollable authority.” Acknowledging that “Mr. Locke, and other theoretical writers” had reasoned to the contrary, Blackstone concluded that their views, “however just . . . in theory,” could never be accepted in practice. On the contrary, “as [long as] the English constitution lasts . . . the power of Parliament is absolute and without control.”24

Jefferson took the opposite view. No government that claims “absolute” power can ever be legitimate, because the people can no more surrender their rights to a legislature than they can to a king. Their rights are “inalienable,” meaning that the people en masse always retain the power to change their government and even overthrow it if it becomes abusive enough. In fact, the Declaration calls this not just a right, but a “duty”—a duty the people owe to themselves and their children (whose rights they have no authority to abandon). This duty was so essential that Franklin even incorporated it into a proposed national motto. In the weeks following independence, when Congress considered adopting a new set of symbols for use in official documents, Franklin designed a national seal depicting Moses parting the Red Sea, surrounded by the words “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”25 His proposal was rejected, but Jefferson liked the slogan so much he had it painted on his dishes. He gave one of the bowls to Adams as a present.26

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

This passage marks the first mention of the king—against whom the entire Declaration was addressed. The document never refers to Parliament by name, calling it only “a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution”—which was consistent with the Patriots’ contention that Westminster never had legislative authority over the colonies in the first place. In their view, Americans were bound to the British political system only by sharing the same monarch, which was why they had consistently professed loyalty to George III, even if they sometimes did so through clenched teeth. They thought the king’s job was to stand above the political system, adjudicating disputes among subjects. Yet George had now declared himself unwilling to do that, thus breaking the reciprocal bond of allegiance and protection. Because that was the sole thread connecting America with Britain, severing it rendered the colonies independent.

Fifty years later, Adams claimed that had he disliked Jefferson’s reference to George as a “tyrant.” He remembered thinking the charge “too personal,” adding that he “never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature.”27 But by the time he wrote this, Adams’s memory was influenced by memories of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had drawn his sympathies toward England. During the independence summer, he offered no objection to the word “tyrant.”28

In fact, it was appropriate. Tyrants rule by fear and intimidation rather than consent, and by 1776, George had made clear that he intended to subdue the Americans by violence and terror. What’s more, he approved Parliament’s claim to total authority over the colonies—a degree of absolutism that included the power to override fundamental constitutional guarantees. His support for Parliamentary absolutism was not inevitable; he could have chosen otherwise. Yet he insisted on backing up Westminster’s assertions of power with overwhelming force, proving much more belligerent than even most of his subordinates. As historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy observes, George was “the main driving force of the British war for America,” regularly urging violence even when his advisors recommended against it.29

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

When John Adams was asked in the summer of 1826 to compose a toast for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he offered merely two words: “Independence forever.” When asked if he wanted to elaborate, the ninety-year-old ex-president replied, “Not a word” (1).

As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence, Timothy Sandefur’s Proclaiming Liberty arrives at a moment when the Declaration is under assault from all directions. It’s dismissed by many conservatives as dangerously abstract, repudiated by “progressives” as a hypocritical cover for oppression, and treated by many legal scholars as mere rhetoric with no binding legal force. Opposing all these positions, Sandefur mounts a carefully documented, intellectually serious, and genuinely stirring defense: He argues that the Declaration meant exactly what it said, that its authors knew what they were doing, and that the principles it proclaims are as valid today as they were in 1776. “What makes the Declaration more than ‘merely revolutionary,’” writes Sandefur, “is the electric spark animating its circuits: the idea that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights, which government must respect, and which people may justly vindicate by rebelling against tyranny” (11).

Sandefur is a prolific scholar whose previous books have covered Frederick Douglass, property rights, and the history of classical liberalism. He is comfortable with legal and philosophic complexities, but he also has demonstrated an ability to write compelling narratives about history rather than dry treatises (most notably in Freedom’s Furies, the story of how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand pioneered the modern liberty movement). In Proclaiming Liberty, he combines both skills. The book is a dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a history of the American Revolution, and a legal argument all woven together with two central questions: How did these men come to believe so strongly in the principles of liberty, and why does it still matter?

The Origins of the Declaration

The first half of the book traces the intellectual growth of Adams and Jefferson from childhood through the eve of American independence. Sandefur demonstrates that the philosophic framework underlying the Declaration was not invented by its authors on the fly during a crisis; rather, it was the considered conclusion of decades of study, legal and moral argument, and direct colonial experience.

For Adams, the thread runs from Cicero and the Stoics through John Locke and Cato’s Letters to the Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew. Mayhew argued that government officials derive their authority from the people, not from divine right or mere custom, and that a ruler who governs tyrannically should be resisted. Mayhew had a profound impression on the fourteen-year-old Adams, who years later sent a copy of Mayhew’s 1749 sermon to Jefferson in retirement, remembering how it had been “a tolerable catechism for the education of a boy . . . who was destined in the future course of his life to dabble in so many revolutions” (21).

Jefferson’s intellectual formation happened largely in Virginia rather than Massachusetts. His mentors, William Small and George Wythe, introduced him to the works of Newton, Locke, and Bacon. He was also a devotee of Greek and Roman philosophers, including Epicurus, Lucretius, and the Stoics. He studied law in Wythe’s office, attended the Virginia House of Burgesses, and at twenty-one, was electrified by the spectacle of Patrick Henry denouncing the Stamp Act. Jefferson later said of Henry, “He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote” (105). Henry’s main argument was essentially the same as Mayhew’s: The British Parliament’s claim of the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” was not a legitimate extension of authority but a usurpation because it rendered the colonists entirely subservient to a legislature in which they had no voice (105).

Sandefur weaves many fascinating anecdotes about both Adams and Jefferson throughout the book, such as the first time Jefferson publicly spoke the words “all men are born free” during his legal defense of a black slave, six years before the Declaration of Independence.

Sandefur traces the decade from the Stamp Act crisis to the Declaration with particular care, and this is one of the book’s most valuable contributions. Most popular accounts of the Revolution oversimplify the situation by reducing it to a story of taxation and rebellion, as if Americans went to war over a stamp duty. Sandefur shows that much more was at stake. He explains that Parliament’s claim was not merely that it could impose taxes—it was that there were no principled limits on its authority at all. British judge William Blackstone even wrote that Parliament could do “everything that is not naturally impossible” (5). It was this doctrine of unlimited parliamentary supremacy—not the details of any single act—that led the colonists to conclude that no diplomatic solution was possible.

Throughout the book, Sandefur effectively demonstrates that this was an argument from principle, not a post-hoc rationalization for a decision already made on other grounds (11). He writes, “For a decade, lawyers like Adams and Jefferson devoted tremendous amounts of time to scholarship, debate, and sometimes delicate negotiations, searching for that solution. But none could be found” (6). The evidence the colonists accumulated to support their grievances was substantial. Sandefur documents the escalation in concrete detail: colonial assemblies shuttered, petitions refused and left unread, soldiers quartered in private homes, jury trials denied and replaced by admiralty courts, American sailors conscripted into the Royal Navy, and even a royal proclamation declaring the colonists the legal equivalents of foreign enemies (6).

By 1776, the question was not whether Americans had legitimate grievances—it was whether those grievances justified the radical step of declaring independence. The Declaration was the argument that they did. Sandefur says that in 1776 Americans “gave up legal and constitutional debates, ceased to assert the ‘traditional rights of Englishmen,’ and put forward their rights as human beings instead” (11).

What the Declaration Actually Says

The book’s second half turns from history to a careful analysis of rights, first principles, and what the Declaration actually says.

The chapter titled “The Rights of British America” covers the Continental Congress of 1774 and its effort to articulate exactly what Americans were entitled to and why. Sandefur shows that this Congress marked the moment the colonial argument shifted from complaints to principled refusals: The Congress did not merely list grievances but declared that Americans possessed rights “by the immutable laws of nature”—rights to life, liberty, and property; to trial by jury; to representative government—rights they had “never ceded to any sovereign power whatever” (251). Following that logic, Parliament’s claim of authority to legislate “in all cases whatsoever” made a diplomatic settlement impossible because accepting such a claim would mean accepting the idea that rights were not immutable “laws of nature” but privileges to be granted or withdrawn at the whim of Parliament or a king (5).

In the face of this realization, the founders responded by asserting the moral principle that precedes, necessitates, and legitimizes government: individual rights. Sandefur argues that when the king refused even to read colonial petitions and endorsed Parliament’s absolutism outright, Americans could no longer defend themselves only with law and history; more fundamental principles were needed. What remained was the deeper question of what makes any government legitimate in the first place. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records”—they are inherent within human nature itself (304). That shift from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of all people is what Sandefur identifies as the intellectual pivot that made the Declaration of Independence not merely possible but necessary.

The Continental Congress’s endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves in September 1774 was, in Sandefur’s telling, a crucial moment—and Adams called it “one of the happiest days of my life.” Drafted by Adams’s friend Joseph Warren after the Massachusetts Government Act banned town meetings, the Resolves declared that no obedience was owed to Parliament’s illegitimate legislation, called on royal officials to resign, urged colonists to arm themselves, and recommended holding any official who tried to seize colonial munitions in “safe custody.” When the Continental Congress officially endorsed this language, British Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Dartmouth proclaimed that it amounted to a declaration of war. He was not wrong. The Congress had moved from petitioning for relief to sanctioning organized resistance, crossing a threshold that could not be uncrossed. Two years before Jefferson put pen to paper, Warren had already stated the essential point: Parliament’s authority was not recognized.

Sandefur then turns to the Declaration and walks through it clause by clause—not as a dry technical analysis but as an effort to uncover what its authors understood themselves to be saying, which turns out to be more rigorous than either its admirers or critics typically acknowledge.

“All men are created equal” is perhaps the most misread phrase in political history. Sandefur addresses both the “progressive” reading (that it promises equality of outcomes) and the conservative reading (that it was a statement about human nature in theory, not a rule for how government must treat people in practice). Sandefur explains why both are wrong:

By “created equal,” the Declaration obviously does not mean that people are equal in terms of talents, skills, or character, or that they should be made equal through the redistribution of wealth or by compelling some to labor for others. It just means that nobody is entitled to dictate how others may live. (330)

Sandefur also points out that unlike the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Jefferson made no exception when it came to slavery, saying “his wording asserts unequivocally that the equality of rights is inherent in human beings, whose rights may never be justly taken away” (331).

The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for the third part of John Locke’s traditional triad of life, liberty, and property receives particular attention, and Sandefur’s analysis is illuminating. He explains that Jefferson was not ignoring property rights—he was making a philosophical point: The reason that people have a right to property is that they have a more fundamental right to pursue happiness—to live a flourishing life as each individual defines it and by his own effort. Property is the result of one’s effort and labor; to take it without consent is to take a portion of someone’s life. Jefferson and the founders understood economic freedom and the pursuit of happiness as inseparable. “In short,” Sandefur writes, “the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ refers to freedom of opportunity. It encompasses the principle that people have the right to use their liberty to obtain property and thereby enjoy happiness in peace” (333).

Equally important is Sandefur’s treatment of the Declaration’s theory of government. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.”1^[1] The word “just” is doing crucial work here. This means that the people cannot organize a government to do what the majority wishes; they can only organize a government that is just. A government designed to oppress any minority (or majority) by popular vote is not a legitimate government, merely a more democratically organized gang. Limiting majority rule by making individual rights foremost is one of the Declaration’s most philosophically important features; without it, the principle of consent collapses into the “tyranny of the majority.” Critics say that this ignores the “common good.” Sandefur addresses this succinctly: “the Declaration recognizes that the preservation of each individual’s freedom is the common good, at least as far as the political realm is concerned” (334–35).

Perhaps the most original section of the book is Sandefur’s argument that the Declaration is not merely a historical document but actual law. He points out that it appears on page 1 of Volume One of the United States Code, is implicitly referenced in the Constitution, and has been regularly applied by courts from the nineteenth century to the present. The claim that the Declaration is not law—advanced by scholars including Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Amy Coney Barrett—rests, Sandefur argues, on an indefensibly narrow concept of what constitutes law. Sandefur points out that laws, to be legally binding, need not command specific behavior or prescribe specific penalties; many laws, such as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, set out principles that guide interpretation without prescribing conduct. The Declaration does the same, establishing the ethical and legal framework for the Constitution. State courts have cited it in cases involving jury rights, occupational licensing, property, and more. Sandefur offers a slew of historical and recent precedents to make his case, including the Amistad trial, writing, “John Quincy Adams cited the Declaration in his famous argument before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case to support his contention that enslaved Africans had the right to kill their enslavers in self-defense” (397).

Whatever one concludes about the specific applications, Sandefur shows that the legal argument that the Declaration is irrelevant to constitutional interpretation is untenable.

1776 Versus 1619

The book closes with an afterword originally published as an essay rebutting the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and it is a model of how to take on a biased, historically distorted argument while keeping his own response measured and fair. Sandefur does not deny America’s history of slavery and racial injustice. He argues that the 1619 Project is a metaphor that fails on its own terms; the claim that America was founded on slavery and that racism is “embedded in the DNA” of the country is historically incoherent, requiring the evasion or suppression of enormous portions of the actual record.

His most devastating point is the simplest. If the Declaration’s authors did not believe the principles they wrote—if “all men are created equal” was somehow a cover for protecting slavery—then why did slavery’s most committed defenders spend decades attacking the Declaration? John C. Calhoun was explicit, announcing that the proposition that all men are created equal contained “not a word of truth”—that people “are not born free,” and that the equality clause had been “inserted” in the Declaration “without any necessity” (380). Chief Justice Taney worked hard in the Dred Scott case to explain why he thought the principles did not apply to black Americans. These men understood exactly what the Declaration said and went to great lengths to argue against it. The 1619 Project’s claim that the founding was a pro-slavery project is refuted by the behavior of slavery’s explicit champions, who recognized that the Declaration was their mortal enemy.

Sandefur also notes what the 1619 Project tries to erase: that the world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia in 1775, that the opponents of slavery consistently appealed to the Declaration’s principles, and that the Fourteenth Amendment was understood by its framers as a refounding—a fulfillment—of the Declaration’s promise rather than a repudiation of it. Sandefur notes that Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration “America’s promissory note.” The standard against which American failures are measured is the Declaration’s standard. To replace it with a false narrative is not to broaden American history but to grotesquely distort it and to deprive Americans of the very principles they need to identify and correct injustice.

Why It Matters Now

When it comes to the Declaration, there is a recurring pattern among American historians, intellectuals, and politicians: It is invoked when convenient and minimized when inconvenient by people across the political spectrum. Conservatives who dislike its universalism call it dangerously abstract or insufficiently rooted in tradition. “Progressives” who dislike its individualism call it a fraud. Legal positivists of both camps call it irrelevant.2 What Sandefur demonstrates, patiently and with formidable evidence, is that all these positions require misreading the document, its authors, or both.

The Declaration is not abstract in the pejorative usage of the term. It is grounded in a specific theory of human nature and political organization that Adams and Jefferson did not conjure out of thin air but rather inherited, tested, refined, and ultimately staked their lives on. That theory—that individuals have rights preceding government, that government’s authority is conditional on its protection of those rights, and that no majority can legitimately authorize the violation of those rights—is not a sentiment or an aspiration. It is the moral foundation on which the United States was built and the argument to which Americans have historically turned when confronting injustice.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the arguments in this book are not academic. The foundational nature of individual rights—the fact that they exist prior to government and constrain what the government may do and are not merely grants that presidents, legislatures, and courts extend and revoke at will—is as contested today as it was in the 1760s. Sandefur’s book does not pretend the question is easy. What it does show—with considerable scholarship and genuine passion—is that the men who first faced that question thought hard about it, argued through it, and reached a firm conclusion that has yet to be improved upon.

Adams wanted nothing added to “Independence Forever.” Sandefur, to his immense credit, does add something: a rigorous and compelling account of where those words came from and why they continue to matter.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Editor’s note: This is an expanded version of a review that was first published on 22 January.

In early 1776, when many Americans still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, stripping monarchy of its pretenses and making the case for American independence. Later that year, as Washington’s army reeled from defeat, Pai…

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As William F. Buckley’s 100th birthday nears, conservatives will pretend that he was a man of principle, civility, dignity, honor.

He was not.

Buckley was cowardly, dishonest, unjust, and racist.

Set aside the trivia that he occasionally challenged communists. So do fascists, theocrats, and anarchists. Saying “down with communism” is not what matters in the moral-political sphere. What matters is being able and willing to defend freedom and capitalism on solid moral and philosophic ground.

Who showed the world how to do that? Ayn Rand did.

How did Buckley treat Rand—the one philosopher in all of history who identified the objective moral foundation for individual rights? He treated her horribly. He misrepresented her ideas, mocked the straw men he fabricated, and made this the MO of his magazine, National Review.1

Why? Because Rand required evidence in support of the ideas she accepted as true; consequently, she was an atheist. And Buckley couldn’t countenance an atheist—no matter her virtues—because his parents, priests, and fraternity brothers would disapprove.2

Among other acts of injustice against Rand, in National Review, which he edited from 1955 to 1990, Buckley published a patently dishonest “review” of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. As I wrote in “How Conservatives Begat Trump,” this “review” was penned by ex-communist Whittaker Chambers.

The reason for the scare quotes around the word review in the previous sentence is that it was not a review but a lie. A big lie. Indeed, it was and remains an unsurpassed (although often aspired to) model of intellectual dishonesty, injustice, malice.

The screed claimed, among myriad additional lies, that “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”

To those who have read Atlas, that one claim is sufficient to convey the jaw-dropping depths of dishonesty involved in the so-called review. For those who haven’t read Atlas, I’ll indicate briefly, without spoiling the plot of the novel, how obscenely dishonest this claim and the entire review it represents are.

Atlas is a story about the role of reason in human life—about the fact that the individual’s reasoning mind is his only means of knowledge and his basic means of living—about the principle that each individual is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others—and about the principle that being moral consists in using one’s mind to pursue one’s life-serving values while respecting the rights of others to do the same.

Among the countless ways in which these ideas are vividly depicted and illustrated in Rand’s thousand-page novel, the heroes of Atlas take an oath, which they all uphold unwaveringly: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

As part of their commitment to living by this oath, the heroes call for a government that does one thing and one thing only: protects the rights of all individuals by banning physical force and fraud from social relationships so that everyone can act on his own judgment, produce goods and services, trade them with others by mutual consent to mutual advantage, and flourish in a land of liberty.

Also as part of their commitment to living by the principle that no one should ever sacrifice or be sacrificed for anyone, the heroes in Atlas, time and again, refuse to cooperate with government officials or unscrupulous businessmen who seek to violate anyone’s rights for any reason in any way whatsoever.

From this book, the reviewer for National Review heard a voice commanding: “To a gas chamber—go”?

He did not. He lied.

He lied to discredit Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. He lied to stop people from reading her work or taking her ideas seriously. And William F. Buckley and the editorial staff at National Review not only published this big lie and stood by it in 1957; they also have republished it repeatedly since then, most recently just a few years ago.

Following this initial conservative big lie about Rand’s ideas, similarly malicious treatments of Rand and her philosophy became the modus operandi of the leaders of the conservative movement. To this day, with few exceptions (Ted Cruz being one), if conservative leaders don’t ignore Rand’s ideas (as Dennis Prager, Jay Cost, and Matt Walsh do), they misrepresent her ideas (as Daniel Flynn, Roger Scruton, Anthony Daniels, Andrew Klavan, Bill Whittle, and countless others do).

With their commitment to ignoring or maligning Rand and her philosophy of rational egoism, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism, leaders of the conservative movement have decisively severed themselves and their movement from any affiliation with the one philosophy that could support freedom, capitalism, and the American republic.3

Unfortunately, that was not the only manifestation of Buckley’s dishonesty and injustice. Among other consequences of these vices, Buckley was a racist.

In his editorial “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, August 24, 1957), Buckley argued for coercive, governmental segregation of blacks and whites in the South. As he put it:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? sic The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . .

National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

So, in the same year that Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged—a hymn to individualism and individual rights—William F. Buckley published a collectivist screed claiming that whites are “the advanced race” and contemplating when it is “worth” using violence to keep blacks in their place.

Yet conservatives lie about Rand and celebrate Buckley.

That speaks volumes.

On October 7, 2023, Israel experienced one of the darkest days in its history. In the early morning hours, Hamas launched a brutal surprise attack, murdering more than a thousand Israelis and taking more than two hundred hostages. Since that day—indeed, since its inception—Israel has been fighting a war for its survival.

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Earlier this week, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was abruptly suspended by ABC after the late-night host made remarks about Donald Trump and the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In his monologue, Kimmel said:

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other…

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New York: Knopf, 2025
245 pp. $30

Thomas Chatterton Williams has recently emerged as one of the most interesting American intellectuals writing on questions of race and “identity politics.” Son of a black father and a white mother, Williams previously published Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), in which he offered an eloquent autobiographical accou…

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On “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs. Declaring a national emergency, he argued that these tariffs are needed to “liberate” the United States from the alleged problems caused by global trade.^[1] He imposed a 10 percent universal tariff on all imports effective April 5 and country-specific “reciprocal”…

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Image: Jonah Elkowitz / Shutterstock.com

Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the vanguard of his stated effort to gut the federal workforce and agencies—claims to cut waste and rein in the reckless spending of the state. Trump’s supposed attempt to reform this by presidential decree is not genuine and will not ultimately succeed bec…

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Written by Scott Payne with Michelle Shephard
Narrated by Scott Payne
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025
6 hrs 55 mins (audio), $14.99

Scott Payne (aka “the hillbilly Donnie Brasco”) is one of the most well-known and respected undercover law enforcement officers of his generation. When Payne retired in 2021—which meant that he no longer had to conceal his tru…

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Ryan Holiday, popularizer of Stoic philosophy and author of such books as The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle Is the Way, was invited to give a lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy in April. Then, one hour before the lecture, the academy canceled it.

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Author’s Note: This article is a companion piece to my previous portrait of Ingersoll, “Robert Ingersoll: Intellectual and Moral Atlas.” Whereas that article focused primarily on his free-thought legacy, this one focuses on his defense of capitalism.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), known as “The Great Agnostic,” is widely recognized for his powerful oratory in defense of free thought, secularism, and individual liberty. However, Ingersoll was also a dedicated advocate of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and the American ideal of self-reliance.

Ingersoll was a lifelong Republican during an era when the party generally defended economic liberty and limited government. He was a prominent campaigner for Republican presidential candidates, leveraging his oratorical prowess to support figures such as Maine senator and presidential candidate James G. Blaine. He admired Blaine for his abolitionism, his pro-business stance, and his strength in navigating the difficult Reconstruction period after the Civil War as speaker of the house. He nominated Blaine for the Republican presidential candidacy in 1876 in what became known as the “Plumed Knight” speech:

This is a grand year—a year in which the people call for a man who has preserved in Congress what our soldiers won upon the field. . . . a man who, like an intellectual athlete, stood in the arena of debate, challenged all comers, and who, up to the present moment, is a total stranger to defeat. Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lances full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every defamer of his country and maligner of its honor. For the Republican party to desert a gallant man now is worse than if an army should desert their general upon the field of battle.1

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Although Blaine ultimately lost the nomination to Rutherford B. Hayes, the rousing speech made Ingersoll a sought-after Republican stump speaker. He went on to campaign for Hayes in 1876 and James Garfield in 1880. He supported these candidates because they stood for the party’s post–Civil War goals of Union preservation, economic progress, and limited government, which aligned with Ingersoll’s political priorities as an advocate for individual liberty. He also supported William McKinley during the 1896 campaign, speaking at events such as the massive Chicago rally in October to promote McKinley’s platform of economic prosperity and his advocacy of a gold standard. Through his campaign speeches and political lectures, Ingersoll championed sound money (meaning a stable currency that retains its value over time because it’s backed by a tangible asset such as gold), criticized inflationary policy, and rejected the popular idea that free enterprise conflicted with the welfare of workers.

Ingersoll’s views on capitalism and free markets stemmed from his philosophic commitment to liberty and individual rights. He recognized that economic freedom is inseparable from personal freedom. Just as he sought to protect the right of individuals to think and speak freely, he also sought to protect their rights to work, trade, and create wealth without interference from the state. His defense of capitalism was based not merely on economic efficiency but on moral grounds—he viewed the abilities to create, trade, and prosper as essential expressions of individual liberty. He often called this “the liberty of hand and brain.”2

Defense of the Gold Standard and Sound Money

Ingersoll strongly supported the gold standard, believing that a stable currency backed by tangible value was essential for economic integrity and long-term prosperity. He warned against the dangers of debased currency, arguing that dishonest money (i.e., currency that wasn’t redeemable for gold or silver, such as the “greenbacks” issued during the Civil War) robbed workers and savers of their hard-earned wealth by reducing the purchasing power of their money through inevitable inflation.3 After the Civil War, the national economic debate was about what should serve as the basis for the nation’s money supply and how its value should be maintained. Should it be backed by gold or should it be fiat currency (currency created by government decree)? Although the gold standard was adopted in 1879, the panic of 1893 (which caused bank failures and high unemployment) fueled calls to abandon it and inflate the money supply. Farmers and debtors wanted this to ease debts and boost prices; bankers and industrialists wanted to stick with the gold standard for stability. In his 1896 speech on the currency question, Ingersoll stated,

The government cannot create wealth by printing paper. Every promise made beyond the power of redemption is fraud. Every effort to create value by decree is destined to end in ruin. The worker who receives his wages in honest gold holds in his hand the fruit of his labor—a token the world over of real value. But to give him payment in depreciated paper is to steal from him in the name of the law.4

Ingersoll understood that inflation is not merely an economic issue but a moral one. He viewed it as legalized theft wherein the government diminishes the value of a person’s labor by manipulating the value of currency. To Ingersoll, the gold standard ensured that laborers and entrepreneurs alike were rewarded fairly for their efforts and that wealth retained its relative economic value across generations.

Harmony between Capital Holders and Laborers

Although some of his contemporaries painted business owners and workers as opposing forces in perpetual conflict, Ingersoll rejected this idea. He believed that the interests of workers and entrepreneurs were naturally aligned—when markets are free, and contracts are voluntary. In a speech extolling the mutually beneficial relationship between business owners and employees, he declared,

There is no conflict between capital and labor. Capital is the fruit of labor, and labor is the father of capital. The man who builds a factory gives work to others; the worker who produces wealth creates the capital that funds future labor. They are not enemies but partners, standing together in the creation of civilization and prosperity.5

Ingersoll understood that capitalism is not a zero-sum game in which one party’s gains come at the expense of another. He viewed wealth creation as a mutually beneficial process in which successful entrepreneurs and investors provide opportunities for workers, and industrious workers (including managers) create the value that enables businesses to grow. This harmony, however, depends on the government protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and not interfering in people’s voluntary transactions.

Praise for Entrepreneurs and Builders

Ingersoll deeply admired the people who created and built industries. He was acquainted with many of them, including Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry Flagler. Ingersoll saw these men as embodiments of human ingenuity and the American spirit. In a tribute to the country’s industrialists and inventors, he remarked,

The men who have made this country possible, who have built its roads, bridged its streams, and turned the wilderness into wealth—they are not robbers, but builders. They have given work to the idle, homes to the homeless, and raised the standard of life. The cry against them is the cry of envy, not of reason.6

Ingersoll did not romanticize wealth in and of itself; he admired the process of wealth creation and the effort behind productive achievements. He believed that wealth honestly earned through production and trade was a noble achievement, not something to be resented or confiscated. Ingersoll stood firmly in the tradition of classical liberalism, a philosophy rooted in the primacy of individual rights, limited government, free markets, and freedom of thought.

Ingersoll’s secular liberalism sharply contrasted with two other growing forces in that era: Christian nationalism and democratic socialism, represented by figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Eugene V. Debs, respectively. Despite their appeals to justice, both movements ultimately wanted to subordinate the individual to a collective cause through force. Bryan sought to bind politics to religious morality, using the state’s power to impose a Christian vision of virtue on the public. He portrayed the working class as righteous victims, and capitalists as oppressors, famously saying, “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold!”7 Bryan would later face off against Clarence Darrow in the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, portrayed in the film Inherit The Wind.8 As for Debs, though he was a well-meaning advocate for the working class, he embraced a secular Marxist vision of economic equality that called for state control over private property and commerce. He went on to run for president as the Socialist Party candidate five times between 1900 and 1920. Although both men invoked the language of “the rights of the people” and “economic justice,” their movements marked a turn away from the Founders’ vision of individual rights and toward a politics of group identity and coercive redistribution. Ingersoll, by contrast, remained loyal to the American idea that rights belong to individuals—not to classes, creeds, or collectives.

Interestingly, both Bryan and Debs had great admiration for Ingersoll. When Bryan was a young man, he wrote to Ingersoll to ask about his views on God and immortality (he was not comforted by Ingersoll’s reply).9 Despite their political differences, Debs and Ingersoll were friends, and Debs idolized Ingersoll for his “noble character.” Ingersoll viewed Debs as a sincere but misguided “dreamer.” After Ingersoll’s death, Debs wrote to his granddaughter, “I was the friend of your immortal grandfather and I loved him truly. The name of Ingersoll is revered in our home, worshipped by us all, and the date of birth is holy in our calendar.”10

Unlike many reformers of his era, Ingersoll was uncompromising in his defense of liberty across the board—in politics, religion, economics, and speech. He championed the individual’s rights against every form of imposed authority, whether from the church, the state, or the mob.

The Value of Art and Culture

Ingersoll’s admiration for wealth creation included admiration for those engaged in artistic and intellectual pursuits. He recognized that free markets and economic prosperity created the conditions under which art and culture could flourish. He observed that societies that valued property rights and free exchange were more likely to produce great works of art, literature, and music. In his lecture “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” he said,

Culture is the child of liberty. Where the mind is free, there art and beauty grow; where chains bind thought, there is only barrenness. Art is the blossom of civilization. It softens the heart, refines the mind, and turns the savage into a man. Music is the voice of the soul, the language of all hearts. It lifts us above the dust and tells of infinite hope.11

In Ingersoll’s time, many in the new but growing socialist movement argued that capitalism stifled art and “noble pursuits” by prioritizing profit and fostering a “vulgar materialism.”12 However, Ingersoll recognized that the flowering of art, music, and culture was not opposed to capitalism; these things were natural products of it. Just as the industrialist envisions and creates bridges and factories for material needs, the artist creates works that entertain and inspire, nourishing our souls. Both forms of creation require liberty and the security of property to thrive.

Opposition to Forcible Redistribution of Wealth and Class Warfare

Ingersoll rejected the growing tide of Marxist ideology that depicted society as being embroiled in “class warfare” between irreconcilably opposed camps of rich and poor. He saw efforts to forcibly redistribute wealth through state action as unjust and counterproductive. In one of his more pointed attacks on socialist ideas, he remarked,

The man who has made money by his brain and hands has the right to enjoy it, and you have no more right to take it from him than he has to take your wages from you. Socialism is theft dressed as philosophy. The war of classes is the war of ignorance, and its fruit is misery.13

Ingersoll’s defense of capitalism was ultimately rooted in his defense of individual rights. He saw the right to own property and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor as a natural extension of one’s right to live freely. Ingersoll understood that any attempt to undermine those rights—whether in the name of equality or fairness, or for any other reason—is a violation of justice. He recognized that political and economic freedom are inseparable—a society that protects freedom of speech and conscience but restricts the rights to trade and to own property would ultimately fail to be free.

Robert Ingersoll’s praise for entrepreneurs, builders, and workers was not only based on economic theory but on a profound moral belief in the dignity of labor and the creative power of human effort. His unwavering support for the gold standard, sound money, and the harmonious relationship between capital holders and laborers reflected his conviction that freedom, prosperity, and justice could only flourish when individuals were able to think, create, and trade freely.

This article is based on Tom Malone’s forthcoming anthology, The Portable Robert Ingersoll, to be released on May 5th.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

On February 1, 2025, President Donald Trump reinvigorated America’s long-standing tariff debate, imposing a 25 percent tariff on many goods from Canada and Mexico, a 10 percent tariff on Canadian oil, and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports.1 After negotiations, the administration agreed to a thirty-day pause on tariffs on Canada and Mexico in exchange for the promise of stronger border security measures. Meanwhile, China retaliated with tariffs on U.S. goods, escalating trade tensions and imposing additional costs on businesses in both countries. Ten days later, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, slapping a 25 percent tariff on metals from all other countries.2 Unlike during Trump’s first term, the administration says it will grant no exceptions for American companies that rely on foreign steel and aluminum.

These measures were welcomed by some domestic steelmakers who had been lobbying the Trump administration for “protection” against foreign competition. Kevin Dempsey, the president of the American Iron and Steel Institute, stated that the group welcomed Trump’s “continued commitment to a strong American steel industry, which is essential to America’s national security and economic prosperity.”3 However, businesses that use metals to make other products, such as car manufacturers and food packaging companies, objected to the rising costs. Robert Budway, president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, supported the tariffs but nevertheless warned of “unintended consequences” for the nation’s food security when tariffs are placed on tin-plate steel.4

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Supporters of Trump’s tariffs include politicians such as Senator Josh Hawley and former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. Both argue that tariffs protect American industries from “unfair” foreign competition, particularly from nations such as China where the government heavily subsidizes many industries. Hawley, who has introduced multiple bills in Congress that would impose tariffs on goods from China, argues that America has an “unsustainable trade deficit”; and Lighthizer claims that without tariffs, “[w]e and our children are poorer and our ostensible trading ‘partners’ are richer.”5

Trump champions tariffs as part of his broader economic protectionist agenda, arguing that they safeguard American industries and help rebuild the nation’s manufacturing base. He also claims his tariffs combat fentanyl abuse in America by punishing the Canadian, Chinese, and Mexican governments for their alleged roles in the crisis (citing the production of fentanyl precursors in China and Canada and Mexico’s failure to prevent the trafficking of the drug into the United States).6

But tariffs don’t tax foreign businesses or governments—they tax you. Every time you buy groceries, fill your gas tank, or replace your car or appliances, you’re paying the price for these government-imposed penalties on your freedom to trade, which restrict your choices and force you to pay more for less. Tariffs won’t stop addiction or protect American producers; they’ll just make life more expensive. Tariffs aren’t a solution—they’re a blatant violation of individual rights masquerading as economic policy in service of political power and cronyism. The evidence is clear: history, economics, and rational moral principles all demonstrate why tariffs fail—and why free trade is the only rational alternative.

A History of Failure: Tariffs in America

From the founding of the American republic, politicians and businesses have used tariffs as tools of political favoritism. The Tariff Act of 1789 had the stated intention of funding the federal government, but it quickly became a way for northern manufacturers to shield themselves from competition. Throughout the 19th century, high tariffs were promoted under the so-called American System, an interventionist program that also involved federally funded infrastructure, and a national bank to manage credit and currency. Although these measures were ostensibly intended to foster economic growth and national unity, they ultimately distorted markets, entrenched political favoritism, and inflamed tensions between the North and South by increasing prices for northern farm equipment that southern farmers needed.7

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, imposed despite dire warnings from economists, triggered an escalation of reciprocal tariffs, collapsed international trade, and worsened the Great Depression. Levied under the guise of protecting American industries by raising tariffs on more than twenty thousand imported goods, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs instead triggered a devastating global trade war that deepened the Great Depression. Economist Thomas Rustici, in his analysis of Smoot-Hawley, describes how protectionism crippled entire industries, leading to mass unemployment, bankruptcies, and severe financial hardship for American families.8

Before Smoot-Hawley, the U.S. automotive sector thrived on exports. However, retaliatory tariffs from other countries slashed international demand for American-made cars. By 1933, the industry had lost an estimated $1.5 billion in exports, devastating firms such as Ford and General Motors. Factory closures and layoffs followed, sending thousands of auto workers into unemployment.

Farmers, already suffering from falling crop prices, were particularly hard hit. Smoot-Hawley raised import duties on foreign agricultural goods, prompting other countries to retaliate by blocking U.S. farm exports. The result was catastrophic: wheat and cotton prices collapsed, farm incomes plummeted by more than 60 percent, and thousands of farmers lost their land. Many resorted to extreme measures, including slaughtering livestock they could no longer afford to feed.

By 1933, U.S. unemployment had reached 25 percent, and Smoot-Hawley worsened the downturn. Families endured widespread poverty, losing homes and life savings as businesses and banks failed. Many survived only by growing their own food and making their own clothes. Rustici describes how some unemployed men rode freight trains across the country searching for work, while others stood in bread lines for basic sustenance. The human toll of this outbreak of protectionism was incalculable.

Although economists highlighted the destructive consequences of Smoot-Hawley in economic terms, they failed to make a compelling moral argument against the tariffs. By focusing solely on economic efficiency—how tariffs distort markets, reduce trade, and hinder economic growth—they overlooked the most important issue: tariffs violate individual rights. A rational moral argument shows that tariffs are fundamentally unjust because they impose coercive restrictions on individuals, limiting their ability to exercise their judgment, produce values, and freely trade them with others—which, in turn, leads to economic disaster and widespread human suffering. Without moral clarity, the tariff debate remains fixated on numbers and ignores the essential point that economic freedom is a right that must be protected absolutely. This leaves the tariff debate wide open for advocates of government intervention to falsely claim the moral high ground and thereby win popular support.

Following World War II, successive U.S. administrations, particularly those of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, reduced trade barriers, which promoted global economic stability and growth. This policy shift led to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, which laid the foundation for freer global trade. Although protectionist pressures persisted, especially in such sectors as agriculture and manufacturing, later administrations, including those of Reagan and Clinton, advanced significant trade liberalization efforts, such as the reduction of tariffs and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. However, in recent decades, the United States has lurched back toward protectionism, with policies such as Obama’s “Buy America” mandate and Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs. Once again, history repeats itself, and the same moral and economic fallacies drive destructive policies.

The False Promise of Protectionism

Tariff advocates make several arguments supporting these taxes—all of which fall apart under scrutiny. Let’s look at three of the most common.

Tariffs Protect Jobs: Politicians claim that tariffs shield American workers from so-called unfair foreign competition. But history shows that tariffs destroy more jobs than they preserve. By raising prices on raw materials and finished goods, tariffs make it harder for businesses to compete, leading to layoffs and closures. For every job “saved” in a protected industry, many more are lost in industries that rely on affordable inputs. Kadee Russ and Lydia Cox’s analysis of the Trump administration’s 2018 steel tariffs provides a compelling example of how protectionist policies harm the broader economy. Although these tariffs were intended to protect American steel manufacturers, their research shows that the costs to downstream industries far outweighed any benefits to steel producers.9

According to Russ and Cox, the tariffs led to only about one thousand additional jobs in steel production. However, the increased cost of steel created a severe disadvantage for industries that rely on it as an input, such as automotive manufacturing, construction equipment, and household appliances. By mid-2019, these industries had suffered an estimated seventy-five thousand fewer jobs than they would have without the tariffs—meaning that for every one job gained in steel production, approximately seventy-five jobs were lost elsewhere in manufacturing.

The reason is straightforward: higher domestic steel prices raised production costs for U.S. manufacturers, making it harder for them to compete with foreign firms that could still buy steel at lower world-market prices. As Russ and Cox explain, this put U.S. exporters at a disadvantage in global markets and made domestic manufacturers less competitive against foreign rivals within the United States. The burden of these tariffs was particularly acute in steel-intensive sectors, leading to layoffs, plant closures, and slowed investment.

The researchers also highlight how tariffs increased economic uncertainty, further undermining business confidence. Companies filed more than one hundred thousand exemption requests in an effort to avoid the increased costs, but the approval process was slow, opaque, and rife with concerns over political favoritism. Meanwhile, retaliatory tariffs from other countries compounded the damage, reducing export opportunities for American manufacturers.

By early 2020, the Trump administration attempted to extend tariffs to derivative steel products, such as nails and wire, to curb import substitution. However, as Russ and Cox argue, this strategy only exacerbated the economic harm, deepening the disadvantages for industries that depended on steel as an input.

Their findings confirm the broader principle that protectionism does not “save” jobs—it merely shifts economic burdens, destroying far more jobs than it preserves. Tariffs on intermediate goods, such as steel and aluminum, ripple through the economy, punishing industries that create far more value and employ far more people than the protected sector. Rather than shielding American workers, these policies erode economic growth and competitiveness, proving once again that free trade—not government intervention—is the path to prosperity.

Tariffs Counter Foreign Protectionism: Some argue that if other countries impose tariffs, we should, too. But matching bad policies with more bad policies doesn’t make sense. Responding to another country’s tariffs with tariffs does not punish the other country—it punishes your country’s citizens. If your neighbor shoots himself in the foot, why would you shoot yourself in your foot? Some advocates of tariffs rightly argue that when foreign governments subsidize industries, they are using political force to grant those businesses a competitive advantage. This, in turn, harms unsubsidized businesses and violates the rights of producers and consumers by coercively redistributing wealth and distorting the market. If a foreign government subsidizes its industries, it is engaging in economic destruction at home and distorting trade abroad—but the answer is not to mimic its mistakes. A moral government does not interfere in markets; it protects individual rights. The rational response to foreign subsidies is not more government control but the elimination of the domestic regulations, tariffs, and subsidies that make American industries less competitive in the first place. The best weapon against economic intervention is capitalism itself—free individuals, free markets, and the removal of all state-imposed distortions in trade and production.

For instance, the Chinese government’s subsidies to its electric bus industry artificially depress prices, depriving Western manufacturers of contracts they might otherwise have won. However, the proper response to such coercion is not to impose new coercion in the form of tariffs, which further violate the rights of consumers and businesses in both countries. Instead, the morally and economically correct course of action is to remove domestic barriers—especially subsidies, mandates, and regulations—that make U.S. businesses less competitive in the first place. Freer societies are always better to live in than less free societies, and a free economy is a critically important part of a free society. The solution to foreign intervention is not domestic intervention but the complete separation of economy and state, which would ensure that American producers succeed on merit, not government favoritism. Nevertheless, figures such as former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro argue that “tariffs are a necessary weapon in economic warfare” and that the United States must match foreign protectionist policies to avoid being “exploited” by trade partners.10 But this approach concedes the false premise that government interference in trade is necessary.

If the Canadian or Chinese governments harm their own citizens through protectionism, the rational response is not to impose self-inflicted harm through retaliatory tariffs but to embrace greater economic freedom. If Canadian businesses are forced to pay higher prices for steel due to their government’s restrictions but American businesses can freely source materials at the best prices available, which economy will thrive? A freer market, with fewer trade barriers and less regulation, fosters greater innovation and growth, leaving protectionist nations with little choice but to deregulate or fall behind—just as the European Union is now reconsidering its regulatory policies in response to competition from the United States and China.11 The solution to foreign economic controls isn’t more control at home—it’s unleashing the productive power of free individuals.

Tariffs Strengthen National Security: Some industries are indeed vital to national defense. But tariffs do not aid these industries or any other—they are exclusively harmful. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended tariffs under the notion that America must maintain control over critical supply chains.12 Navarro has insisted that “China’s economic aggression is the single biggest national security threat of our time.”13 Although China is a threat to the United States in some respects, that fact does not legitimize self-destructive tariffs (which are not synonymous with sanctions or other interventions necessary to protect national security in certain contexts).

Regardless of whether China poses a national security threat to the United States, it is not rational or appropriate to mirror China’s interventionism with our interventionism, whether in the form of tariffs or any other rights-violating measures. Instead, the proper solution is to remove domestic restrictions that prevent U.S. businesses from thriving in a free market. America cannot protect critical supply chains by restricting trade; rather, it must remove burdensome regulations, lower corporate tax rates, and eliminate barriers to domestic production and innovation. Rather than shielding American companies from foreign competition, the best way to neutralize strategic threats is to increase domestic productivity, foster competition, and allow businesses to shift suppliers dynamically based on market conditions, not political mandates.

For legitimate security concerns, a free-market approach includes targeted policies such as strategic stockpiles, defense contracts, and voluntary industry incentives—not blanket tariffs that punish all trade. Protectionism weakens America’s economic strength by limiting flexibility, increasing costs, and making industries dependent on government intervention. If the United States truly seeks economic resilience against potential strategic competitors, it should embrace the power of a free market to outproduce and out-innovate authoritarian regimes—rather than adopting their policies.

Why Tariffs Stick Around: Politics over Principles

If tariffs are so destructive, why do politicians continue to impose them? The immediate answer is economic ignorance. Many policy makers and voters misunderstand basic trade principles, falsely believing that tariffs protect jobs, strengthen industries, and prevent trade deficits. Politicians exploit this misunderstanding, portraying tariffs as a tool to shield American workers from “unfair” foreign competition.

But economic ignorance alone does not explain why tariffs persist. If bad economics were the sole cause, protectionism would have collapsed long ago. A deeper reason sustains tariffs: moral collectivism—the belief that the “nation” must come before the individual and that individuals should sacrifice for some alleged “greater good.” Supporters frame tariffs as a patriotic duty, a way to “put America first,” as if restricting trade strengthens the country. This same moral premise underlies other forms of government intervention—the idea that individuals must subordinate their interests to the collective, and that economic freedom must yield to national solidarity.

Even the way politicians sell tariffs reflects this moral failing. Senator Josh Hawley claims that tariffs “protect the American worker,”14 as though workers have a moral right to government-imposed shields from competition rather than a right to freely produce and trade. Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer argues that without tariffs, “[w]e and our children are poorer and our ostensible trading ‘partners’ are richer,”15 implying that other nations’ success harms America—a classic example of zero-sum, tribalist thinking. These arguments rely not just on faulty economics but on the false premise that the government must control trade to engineer social outcomes.

Tariffs also persist because they protect entrenched interests. Politicians secure votes from industries that gain an advantage in the short term, while the costs—higher prices, job losses in downstream industries, and economic inefficiencies—spread across millions of individuals who may not realize how tariffs harm them. This redistribution of wealth through government coercion is not just economically disastrous but morally indefensible. So, although politicians push tariffs as populist rhetoric, the only “beneficiaries” are those who rely on government protection to keep producing products that would not be competitive in a free market. And once in place, tariffs are embedded in bureaucratic structures, making them difficult to repeal despite their clear harm.

Free Trade: The Moral and Practical Alternative

Tariffs don’t just hurt your wallet—they violate your freedom. They reduce your access to the best goods at market prices, forcing you to enrich politically connected industries while limiting your ability to act in your rational self-interest.

At stake here are your rights—including your right to produce, trade, and keep the rewards of your work. A free economy enables you to act in your self-interest without political interference. Tariffs violate this principle by forcibly limiting your choices and making it harder (or impossible) to purchase goods that best meet your needs—and to freely produce and trade your goods.

The next time a politician defends tariffs as a way to “help” America, ask yourself: Who, exactly, is being helped? Not the consumer, who is forced to pay more. Not the honest businessman, who is fully capable of creating value without such “help.” Not the entrepreneur, who is denied access to affordable materials. The only ones who “benefit” are those who have successfully lobbied the government to rig the game in their favor and politicians who get reelected for peddling economic nationalism as a substitute for improving human flourishing. And in the long run, even these people suffer from a weaker economy, deprived of the wealth, innovation, and opportunities that tariffs stifle.

The only morally justifiable trade policy for a free society is free trade—trade without interference, without coercion, and without government picking winners and losers. The question before us is simple: Do we want a society in which individuals are free to trade and prosper, or do we want a society in which bureaucrats dictate the terms of economic exchange? If we value liberty, the answer is clear. Tariffs must be abolished because they are an affront to the fundamental principle of human freedom—and that is why they fail in practice.

The Path Forward: Embracing Free Trade

Tariffs don’t make America great—they make life harder and worse for Americans. The proper trade policy for a free people is simple: Let people trade. If other nations choose protectionism, that’s their mistake. America should lead by example, showing the world that economic freedom leads to prosperity.

It’s time to stop letting politicians and special interests rig the game and start letting Americans make their own choices.

This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

Donald Trump ran on a platform that promised major cost-cutting initiatives spearheaded by a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The head of DOGE, Elon Musk, is now under fire from Democrats for allegedly overstepping his authority, and the creation of DOGE by executive order is being challenged as unconstitutional.¹ Republicans argue that Musk has statutory authority, pointing out that DOGE is not a Cabinet agency and does not have to be approved by Congress (and will only last until July 4, 2026). Historian Victor Davis Hanson makes the point that “it’s not a permanent agency, but he has the same power, or lack of such, as the national security adviser, who does not have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.”2 Legal wrangling aside, the most fundamental question is whether the government should even be engaged in the spending DOGE is now investigating.

Granted, questions about DOGE’s legitimacy as a government agency are valid, given that it was created by executive order. In a truly free society, the president should not and would not have the power to unilaterally create such an agency but for an emergency; checks and balances within the American government were created for important, rights-protecting reasons. But we find ourselves in a situation in which politicians have lost sight of those reasons, resulting in a government that has grown massively beyond its proper, rights-protecting function. That growth and its economic consequences have arguably created an emergency in which Americans are faced with unsustainable rises in cost of living, a debt burden that exceeds annual economic output, and increasing restrictions on their freedom. In that context, DOGE’s efforts to curtail those activities are legitimate.

Government Power in General Is the Issue, Not Only DOGE’s

The federal government has long abandoned the constitutional limits that the founders set to prevent it from violating Americans’ rights to life, liberty, and property. Rather, it has engaged in massive redistribution of wealth, reckless spending, and programs that have no basis in the enumerated powers outlined in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A wise and frugal government . . . shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”3 Yet today politicians openly disregard this principle, taking from productive citizens and spending so recklessly that our debt burden is now $36 trillion.

DOGE says that it has already uncovered numerous instances of wasteful and rights-violating spending within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among the most controversial findings is the revelation that USAID unknowingly funded the college tuition of Anwar al-Awlaki, a future al-Qaeda recruiter linked to the 9/11 hijackers.4 The audit also exposed funds allocated to controversial cultural projects, such as a $47,000 grant for a Colombian opera about transgenderism. Other expenditures included $1.5 million to promote “diversity and inclusion” initiatives in Serbia and $70,000 for a DEI-themed musical in Ireland.5

Perhaps most alarming, the report found that millions of taxpayer dollars were directed to public international organizations (PIOs) with ties to terrorist groups, even after an inspector general launched an investigation into those organizations’ activities.6 In addition, DOGE revealed that USAID has funded a vast media network, including payments to more than six thousand journalists and support for more than seven hundred media organizations globally.7 The report also pointed to millions in funding granted to EcoHealth Alliance, an organization tied to gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.8

These revelations have sparked intense debate over the role and oversight of USAID and other agencies, fueling calls for budget cuts and restructuring efforts. Musk and his team at DOGE argue that such wasteful, rights-violating spending highlights the broader issue of government overreach and inefficiency. As the administration moves to slash funding and increase oversight, it is already facing intense backlash and legal challenges from Democrats.

Musk and Trump should seize the opportunity to reframe the conversation: The real issue is not whether DOGE has the right to curb spending but whether the government should be able to take money from individuals by force and use it in ways that violate their liberty and property.

Individual Rights: The Moral Foundation of Government

If one recognizes the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outlined in the Declaration of Independence, then the role of government becomes clear: to secure those rights and nothing more. The philosopher Ayn Rand articulated this beautifully when she wrote, “The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.”9 By this standard, the federal government should be restricted to its only proper functions: national defense, the courts, and policing.

The vast majority of federal spending is immoral and unconstitutional. Government programs that forcibly redistribute wealth through welfare, corporate subsidies, foreign aid, federal grants, or toward any other purpose outside the proper role of government—violate individuals’ rights to their earnings.

The Danger of Appealing to Democracy

Musk has attempted to counter criticism by stating that the goal of DOGE is to “restore democracy.”10 But this is a fatal error—one that plays directly into the hands of his critics. The concept of “democracy” is widely misunderstood today. Most people take it to mean something along the lines of “a broadly free society in which leaders are elected by popular vote.” But the literal and historical meaning of “democracy” is mob rule. If we accept actual “democracy” as a value, we implicitly accept that majority opinion justifies any and all government action—including the very overreach DOGE is working to correct. If democracy is good, then what happens when the majority elects outright socialists or communists who decide that wealth confiscation should be even more aggressive?

This is precisely why the founding fathers were skeptical of democracy. James Madison wrote, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”11 The Constitution was designed not as a tool of majority rule but as a bulwark against the violation of individual rights. America is not—and was never meant to be—a democracy; it is a constitutional republic where laws are meant to protect against mob rule.

The Founders’ Vision versus Mob Rule

The founding fathers deliberately structured the government to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Instead, they established a system in which individual rights were never to be violated, even if the majority wished otherwise. The Bill of Rights exists to prevent the government from infringing upon freedom of speech, property, and commerce, no matter how many voters support such violations.

Anyone who wants to defend DOGE’s cost-cutting mission effectively should reject the false moral premise that spending cuts are only justified if they have democratic backing. Instead, we must champion the objective principle of individual rights and argue that the government has no moral right to confiscate and redistribute wealth.

Rather than appealing to democracy, Musk should make the case for a government limited solely to the protection of individual rights. With this kind of system, there would be no need for initiatives such as DOGE because the rights-violating spending it seeks to eliminate would not exist in the first place.

Trump, too, should frame the fight against wasteful spending in moral terms. It’s not just about finding “waste, fraud, and abuse” in a corrupt system—it’s about rejecting the immoral premise that the government has a right to spend taxpayer dollars however it pleases. The goal should not be to enable the government to violate rights more efficiently—the goal should be to make it properly delimited and stop rights-violating government spending.

Musk and Trump are right to challenge the bloated federal budget and should be commended for doing so—but they must go further; they must challenge any and all rights-violating government spending. The proper defense of DOGE is not that it serves “the will of the people” but that it aligns (or at least that it should align) with the foundational principles of America—individual rights and limited government.

As Jefferson put it, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”12 To reverse this trend, Trump and Musk must make a principled stand: The size and scope of government should be dictated not by democracy but by individual rights.

This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

Traveling to different countries to speak at conferences is a big part of my work, and I love it. But when I was asked to speak at Ayn Rand Center Ukraine (ARCU)’s 2025 Intellectual Bootcamp in Kyiv, I was hesitant. I have enough Ukrainian friends to know that large parts of the country are safer than it appears in Western news coverage. Nonetheless, the real danger of frequent Russian air raids, the nationwide state of martial law, and the complexity of visiting a country with completely closed airspace were all off-putting.

What convinced me to go regardless was the remarkable spirit of the people organizing and attending the event. Although this would be my first time visiting Ukraine in person, I had previously spoken at several ARCU events remotely, my face and presentation projected onto a wall at the conference. Each time, I was impressed by the dedication of the people coming together in the middle of a war to sit in a shelter and discuss ideas for living better lives and advancing the cause of freedom. Not only were they not letting the war stop them from living their lives—they were proactively working to enhance their lives despite it. Their spirit embodies much of what I believe in, and it was clear to me that taking the comparatively small risk of going to join and support them was the right thing to do.

Now, looking back on the conference, I’m enormously thankful that I went. My goal in taking part was to inspire, educate, and motivate the attendees, but in truth it was they who inspired me. Here were people who took the ideas they believed in so seriously that they’d taken trains across a country constantly threatened by drone and missile attacks to discuss and promote those ideas. If they could display such dedication, how could I justify letting the trivial inconveniences of everyday life in the West hold me back from advancing my goals to the best of my ability?

Virtually all the young students I met at the Intellectual Bootcamp had a proactive, optimistic outlook. I see that kind of mentality in only a select few individuals at such events elsewhere. These were people who, faced with the massive threat to human life that is Putin’s war machine, were determined to embody the very human spirit that the invaders seek to crush. Their spirit reminds me of the stories I’ve heard of Britain during World War II—a culture of defiant positivity, of laughter in the face of tyranny, and of an unashamed commitment to living life.

Ukraine is one of the front lines in the fight not only for freedom but for the human spirit. That spirit was embodied beautifully in Ayn Rand Center Ukraine’s Intellectual Bootcamp. For all my trepidation before the trip, I am enormously glad I went, and I cannot wait for my next opportunity to benefit from spending time with such passionate advocates of freedom and human life.

Author’s note: The following is adapted from talks given to participants of the Students For Liberty Prometheus Fellowship.

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