HAPPY PLACE
was still synonymous with land and land was still synonymous with riches. Until Adam Smith succeeded in improving the world’s understanding of economics (if he ever did), land was considered to be the only ultimate source of profit. The Declaration was written by Jefferson, but it was revised and edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson was a devotee of property in the sense of land and chattel (of animal and other kinds). But Adams, though a farmer, had no Jeffersonian vision of America as a pure, agrarian society. Perhaps this was because Adams, unlike the perpetually debt-plagued Jefferson, made a living from his farm. Adams and Franklin understood that trade, manufacturing, and finance would be as significant to America as “real” estate. And Franklin had a personal interest in a type of ownership different from a land title, ownership of what we would call intellectual property. (Franklin’s influence made it no coincidence that the power to approve patent rights would be granted in Article I of the forthcoming Constitution, and that the first act passed by the new Congress of the United States would concern patent law.) Roger Pilon, preeminent Constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute think tank, believes there was a further reason that Locke’s natural law concept of property was fudged slightly in the Declaration of Independence. Pilon concludes that Jefferson saw a flaw in the logic of Locke’s “unalienable” rights.
Property has to be, in a legal sense, alienable – “capable of being transferred to a new owner” – or you can’t sell it. If we lived in a country where property was unalienable, Steve Wozniak and the heirs of Steve Jobs would still own the pocket calculator they sold to raise the money to start Apple. Therefore, when we went to work, there’d be nothing on the screen of the computer that didn’t exist at the job we don’t have because we’re still farming the 20-acre tobacco patch that our ancestors cheated the Indians out of for beads and trinkets the last time anybody was allowed to buy or sell anything... during the reign of George III. Roger Pilon maintains that “Pursuit of Happiness” idea of materialism to include every kind of material – mental, physical, metaphysical, whatever. America was established as a way for Americans to make and do things. What sort of things Americans make and do and whether these things lead to great riches, pious satisfactions, or transitory pleasures is nobody’s business but our own. America has a purpose... But we Americans get to individually, personally, separately decide on what that purpose is. Whether we find happiness or not, it is our duty as patriotic Americans to go chase the thing. replaced “Property” in the Declaration of Independence not to denigrate material wealth but to expand the
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July 2019
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