A New Declaration
If the truths of the Declaration of Independence were self-evident, why were they such a big deal? In fact, they were not self-evident. The Declaration “held” them to be self-evident, meaning that it was declaring them to be so. But unlike the move to declare independence, the declaration that “all men are created equal” was not a willful decision. It was a culmination of thinking and reflection about our status as human beings, resulting in the insight that we are all equal, not because we declare it to be so, but because we are all granted the same unalienable rights from our Creator.
Once this idea was stated, people could recognize that it was self-evidently true. Before that moment, it was a hidden truth, backed up by a sense for justice that was left unexpressed and unexplained. It was only when it was proclaimed that we could recognize it as the truth of our humanity.
Expressing that truth, holding it to be self-evident, changed the world. Instead of looking at forms of inequality as normal and unavoidable, we could begin to see them as transgressions against a self-evident truth. For the last 250 years, our country has been in a long struggle to transform our institutions to honor that truth. The greatest victories have been the Civil War, the expansion of suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement. In all these cases, the challenge was to eliminate government restrictions that created different classes of people that are treated differently.
But even as we have celebrated these victories, we see new threats to the ideal of equality. In declaring “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to be unalienable rights, our founders were careful to avoid affirming a right to happiness, only the equal right to its pursuit. We are free to succeed or fail based on our own efforts and the judgments of providence.
Accordingly, we must promote equality of opportunity rather than equal outcomes. In fact, the attempt to create equal outcomes undermines our rights, limiting our freedom and constraining our ability to pursue happiness. This is because the only way to create equality of outcomes is for the government to re-introduce class distinctions where there were none before.
As an example of this, let’s consider rent control. The idea is to give everyone equal access to affordable housing. In order to do this, though, a certain class of people are given the right to pay below-market rent. Whether this is done by limiting the rent that is paid to landlords through rent control, having the government directly provide housing to certain people at reduced rates, or having the government pay part of the market-rate rent, the effect is to create two classes of people. One class receives a government benefit, and the other class does not.
The argument is that there are already two separate classes of rich and poor, and that subsidies to the poor are required to make them equal to the rich. The problem here is that the poor are not a class. If I receive a low income today, it does not mean that I won’t receive a higher income tomorrow. In fact, that is the typical development as people mature and get better jobs as they grow older. Rent control undermines this process by creating two classes of people: those who are in rent-controlled housing and those who are not.
There is no way to avoid this creation of a class distinction if we provide a government benefit. If the rent-controlled status is applied to the apartment, then even the rich can be living in rent-controlled housing and would become part of the class of people who are protected from market prices. If people lose the rent subsidy as their income goes up, then they are motivated to keep their income low so as to avoid losing the government subsidy, thus trapping them in a low-income status. Either way, the effect is to create two classes of people based on their treatment by the government.
Not only is this inherently unfair and a violation of the principle of equal treatment under the law, it exacerbates the problem of the high cost of housing. Those who are receiving rent-controlled housing are protected from the market but constrained in their lives, either not able to earn additional income or not able to move. Those who are outside of the rent-controlled system end up paying even higher rents because there is a reduced supply of market-rate housing, driving up prices. As anyone looking for housing in New York knows, there is a privileged class of people who occupy rent-controlled apartments and are sometimes quite wealthy. Meanwhile, any new people coming to the city, typically the young, are faced with sky-high rents.
The solution of making all housing rent-controlled then makes everyone subject to the whims of the government employees who will inevitably be making the decisions about who gets to live in which apartments. Clearly there will be differences in quality of apartments, larger and smaller, better and worse furnishings, better or worse views, but those differences will not be reflected in the prices because they are not set by the market. The people with the best apartments will be the ones with the best connections to the government employees who make the decisions about who gets to live where – the socialist housing model. In such a world, the main class distinction then becomes the difference between those who work in government and control housing resources and those who don’t.
Over almost a century, we have shifted more and more of our economy – health care, housing, food distribution, retirement, insurance – into this government-controlled model, subjecting more and more people to administrative control of their lives, undermining their freedom and limiting their ability to pursue happiness as they see fit.
It is time for a new declaration of independence from government control over our lives. If we were to dissolve all government benefits in our welfare and entitlement systems into cash, we would have about $4 trillion per year. Dividing this amount by the 250 million Americans age 21 and over, we arrive at an annual payment of $16,000 per year per person. By dissolving government benefits that are given to only part of the population and instead giving this money to all people equally, we would be solving two problems at once. On the one hand, we would eliminate the class system that separates people that receive government benefits from those who don’t. On the other hand, we would be providing everyone with the freedom and opportunity to pursue happiness in the way that they see fit. In addition, rather than continuing a system that only funds consumption, we would create a system that encourages investment. Rather than maintaining bureaucratic control over people’s most important life decisions concerning housing, health, food, and retirement, we would be granting people the freedom to make their own choices. Rather than raise taxes or increase government spending, we would be reducing government spending to create a massive tax cut.
If you agree that we need to make a new declaration of independence, please join my campaign and help me to return our nation to the track of freedom and opportunity for everyone without distinction. Check my website at DavidPanforCongress.com. Please consider a donation of $5 or $10 to help us move forward to a new era of freedom.
God bless you and God bless the United States of America.
