THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY

Happy Fourth of July! Today we celebrate the birth of the United States of America, the only country on Earth founded on the idea that individuals have rights that the government may not arbitrarily violate for its own benefit or for the benefit of other people.

This year, the idea of individual rights is under attack. Some people think the government should forcefully override individual rights to classify people into oppressor and victim groups, or to compel behavior for a perceived greater good. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s a very old argument.

So it seems like a good time to explain the mechanics of building a free country. This is a structure that will work anywhere, regardless of history, geography or culture. And it is a structure that can be destroyed anywhere, even in the United States.

The “fundamental rights of individuals,” wrote Sir William Blackstone, the 18th-century English judge and legal scholar whose work influenced the framers of the United States Constitution, are life, liberty and property. He described the right to “a person’s legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life,” the liberty “of changing situations or moving one’s person to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct,” and the “absolute right” of property, “which consists in the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land.”

The Constitution went further; it limited, divided and checked the power of government so the laws of the land would never be the arbitrary rulings of a monarch or the dictates of an unaccountable gang of rulers. The principle underlying this new structure was stated in the Declaration of Independence in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-ev

PHOTOS: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM “When life, liberty and property are protected from arbitrary government actions, it becomes possible to undertake long-term efforts that produce phenomenal accomplishments,” writes Susan Shelley.

“Freedom is indispensable to the well-being of humanity, and freedom is made out of the protection of individual rights under a government of limited power,” writes Susan Shelley.