Why the Founders Would Join OCPA

September 01, 2008

By J. Rufus Fears

The days that followed September 11 have presented our country with a challenge every bit as great as that faced by the generation of the American Revolution. But there is one critical difference. At the time of the Revolution, there was true bipartisan support for the difficult task of liberty that lay ahead.

Think what that generation achieved. They declared their independence from the greatest superpower of its day, and then went on to win that independence on the field of battle. Many of those boys who went into battle were teenagers, fighting alongside fathers as old as I am.

They declared that independence based on an enduring set of values that are declared in our Declaration of Independence: "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."

The founders of our country rose up with the same principles that are dear to OCPA. The colonists had been proud to be subjects of the British Empire; they were loyal English men and women. But the British government wished (1) to create a strong, centralized government in the colonies, and (2) to impose heavy taxes on the American colonists. Parliament preserved for itself the sole right of taxation, yet at the same time was fiscally irresponsible and had a huge debt which they wanted the colonists to pay off. Moreover, they were instituting a series of governmental regulations aimed at strangling the free-market economy of these colonies.

Does any of this sound familiar to members of OCPA? The founders wanted a free-market economy, political liberty, no strong, central government telling you what to do, and limited taxation. In fact, the colonists were telling the British the very thing now inscribed on an OCPA bumper sticker: "Put government on a diet!" And they were willing to take on this great superpower.

When they talked about "the pursuit of happiness," they were talking about their political freedom and, equally important, their economic freedom-their ability to earn money and to keep what they earned and to use it in the way they saw fit. They also believed that part of the "pursuit of happiness" was to ensure that liberty rested upon a foundation of morality and religion, that you could not separate liberty, religion, and morality.

They won that revolution, and in so doing a bipartisan consensus was built, a bipartisan support that educated citizens of these 13 colonies for this freedom. They learned from their pulpits, they learned in their town hall meetings, they learned in discussions around the general store. And however wise the founders of our country were, equally wise were these ordinary Americans who understood these principles of freedom and were willing to fight and to die for them.

But just winning our independence is not enough. We would have remained nothing but an historical footnote unless in one summer in 1787, 55 delegates came together in Philadelphia and created a constitution that still gives us freedom under the law and the most prosperous economy in the world. And they did it in an age when the technology was no more advanced than during the time of the Roman Empire. Yet this constitution still gives us this prosperity and freedom more than 200 years later.

But again, had the Founders merely created that constitution, it too would have been an historical footnote. It was ratified by the ordinary American throughout the 13 colonies. They educated themselves as to what this constitution meant, and the media joined in this education process, with newspapers printing James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. The media were not disinformation, they were the information. And the Federalist Papers were one of the most brilliant sets of political exposition since Plato and Aristotle.

OCPA continues in that same tradition of educating our citizens that economic freedom must march hand in hand with political freedom, and reminding our citizens that this Revolution was created by 13 states acting independently. Did you know that Virginia declared its independence before the United States did? OCPA calls us back to the belief that every state should work out its own destiny, that what's right for Massachusetts may not be right for the good citizens in the heartland of Oklahoma. For these reasons it is my great privilege to be associated with OCPA.

J. Rufus Fears (Ph.D., Harvard University) is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, where he holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty. He also serves as the Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for Freedom Enhancement at OCPA.

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