A Declaration of Liberty for the 21st Century

(NOTE to Readers: This article was first published August 17, 2024, before the 2024 election. Although President Trump’s victory was a step in the right direction, many obstacles to liberty still exist in the United States; there is enormous fraud, widespread misinterpretation of the US Constitution, and many in Washington DC playing power politics behind the scenes to maintain their elicit fiefdoms. Stay vigilant!).

A Declaration of Liberty for the 21st Century
By Patrick Peterson, Ph.D.

“When in the course of human events…” – Thomas Jefferson, 1776

When governing institutions assume excessive powers and authorities, usurping the natural rights of humanity, it becomes necessary to declare their illegal and immoral violations, and to begin the necessary steps either to reform or dissolve such institutions, to align with fundamental principles of human rights as endowed by our Creator.

We affirm the following truths of our social arrangement: that all men and women are created with inherently equal and maximal rights; that the sole purpose of any governing institution is to uphold and defend these rights; and that government, even if ostensibly managed by democratically elected representatives of the people, has no inherent powers or rights, and the sole moral and legal authority for governance is derived only through the informed consent of the governed, the contractual validity of which depends entirely on the extent to which government promotes and defends the essential liberties of humanity.

Democracy by itself is not (and cannot be) the proof of a just society. Without the constraints of Law, majorities will trample minorities; or worse, a tiny influential elite will manipulate the system to empower government at the expense of everyone’s rights. Federal and state constitutions exist solely for the purpose of defining and limiting the power of government, so that maximal and equal human rights can be maintained without the growth and encroachment of government. Yet despite this clear framework, codified explicitly in the Bill of Rights and especially in the 9th and 10th Amendments, the US Constitution has repeatedly been misinterpreted as allowing for an outrageously expansive central government that intrudes upon and regulates almost every facet of individual life experience, including the food we may produce and eat, the goods we are allowed to exchange, what devices we may operate, etc. ad nauseum down to the level of monitoring, recording, and essentially spying on our every action, utterance, and transaction.

We believe and assert that human beings are inherently gifted with powers of self-direction, creativity, self-management, and the social abilities to form voluntarily all necessary and desired friendships and contractual alliances to meet our needs and to promote our creativity, ingenuity, and industry. All men and women have a right to ownership of the fruits of our alliances, labor, and industry, without excessive and burdensome regulation and taxation. No governing institution has either the right or the responsibility to attempt to define or provide for the nourishment or happiness of humanity, much less regulate human behavior for elaborate schemes of elite minorities. When government exceeds its limited role, as to engage in vast expenditures and grandiose social engineering, we must loudly oppose such tyrannical schemes as fundamentally abusive of human rights (and illegal per the 9th and 10th Amendments): It is a federal government far exceeding its precisely limited roles as dictated by our Constitution.

It must be understood that human rights are inherently as expansive, comprehensive, and maximal as conceptually possible, limited only by the requirement that rights must be equally shared; and as such the only upper limit on human rights is that no one shall infringe upon, or diminish the rights of another. Government has no just purpose other than to secure and defend this social order of maximal and equal rights.

Misinformation about human rights has unfortunately been common during the past century. Sometimes our beliefs about human needs and desires are confused with rights. There can be no right to goods and services that place demands and burdens on another (which would necessarily reduce another’s rights and thus violate the principle that rights are equal and maximal). And so for example, there is no “right” to health care, education, paid work, or a minimal income. Any attempts by government to provide such goods or services are de facto a violation of human rights, as government has no actual wealth or productivity that isn’t confiscated from someone; and as such government cannot provide goods and services without essentially forcing people involuntarily to provide such goods and services.

Thomas Paine once wrote that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” This wasn’t merely an expression of frustration with the British government of his day; he was expressing a fundamental truth of humanity. Government is necessary solely because of the flaws of human kind, the tendencies of any individual to try to gain some advantage over others, to have in effect “more rights than you.” Government can thus serve as an arbiter and manager of the framework to ensure rights are respected. But over time the very existence of any form of government can grow cancerous. The privilege of governing can breed a sense that the people would be better managed if only the government had more and more power, influence, surveillance, etc. Ambitious individuals imagine government can and should fund vast schemes of public works; yet such ambitions intrinsically burden the shoulders of a society who never consent to any such schemes. Meanwhile, citizens in pursuit of their own personal spheres of happiness can easily ignore and miss the growing encroachment of government well beyond its intended boundaries.

Human beings are disposed to patterns of habit, and we tend to give established institutions the benefit of the doubt as to the legitimacy of their practices. Most people are enormously generous and willing to assist their fellow citizens a great deal, such that a coerced generosity may for a time go almost unnoticed or at least tolerated in the interest of just “getting on with life.” We admire Americans’ ability to bear remarkable involuntary burdens. Slights and infringements upon our liberties may be sustained for a considerable time, perhaps generations, before we eventually pay attention to public affairs sufficiently to begin recognizing despotism in any one of its many forms. Such focus on our personal affairs should never be mistaken for informed consent to tyranny.

Eventually all people reach their limits of tolerance, when the proclamations and behaviors of public institutions have sufficiently metastasized to unrecognizable and grotesque forms, indicating a vast pattern of abuses and violations so prevalent and regular that we can no longer ignore or delay a rigorous response. The American people have been very patient with our governing classes, but our patience is rapidly shrinking toward a gaunt and skeletal minimum. As with Great Britain in 1776, we suffer today “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” inflicted by federal and state governments, often in unhealthy alliance with globalist corporations or other dubious non-governmental organizations.

Our supposedly elected representatives behave as though bribed or blackmailed by interests inconsistent with American history and principles, even against human nature itself. Our so-called leaders have reached a moral nadir, where “public service” is merely a euphemism for amassing wealth from shady sources and endeavors. It is remarkable that so many elected officials manage enormous growth of their personal wealth while earning only modest salaries in office. More important are the vast sums of wealth the government funnels to special interest projects in the name of public interest or national security, efforts and expenditures that not only fail to promote and defend liberty but directly oppose it. The corruption of government is an almost universally recognized truth, but the entire structures and systems of government seem deliberately designed to obscure any precise identification of crimes: The exact who/what/when/where of criminality remains obscure despite the public’s clear awareness that overall it is a cauldron of criminality.

Worse than the criminality itself is the implication that government is not actually controlled by or even much influenced by the elected officials. In the distant past, it might have been considered a wild surmise to think that the “ship of state” was largely directed by shadowy figures acting in secrecy; today this hypothesis is widely considered plausible and perhaps even probable. Needless to say, we cannot successfully limit government to its proper and legal role when we don’t even know who or what the government is and what it is actually doing in its entirety.

The veil of secrecy that cloaks much of the who/what/when/where of government activity represents its greatest threat to human rights, also imposing the question of whether the Republic can still be considered a Republic. In the 20th century we made the grotesque error of creating and empowering a police state, by creating the FBI and CIA and enabling them to function largely in secret and with minimal to no oversight. Other federal agencies have expanded to include their own policing powers and veils of secrecy. The emerging miasma of “federal government as police state” now deploys in the 21st century the worst elements of 21st century technology: mass surveillance and data collection, electronic media for spreading propaganda and disinformation, and artificial intelligence employed in the service of such surveillance and disinformation. Political harassment, imprisonment, assassination, and even the overthrow of elected government constitute staple skills of our national (now international) police state. The transformation of federal government into police state has turned the more “ordinary” government violations against the maximality and equality of human rights into full-blown crimes against humanity.

Against this backdrop of a globally ambitious police state, the various American state governments have sadly tended toward their own versions of megalomania, eager to claim “me too” authority for social manipulation. Governors were quick to grab “emergency powers” during the much over-hyped medical scare known as “Covid-19.” They declared that fundamental human rights to gather for politics, worship, education, or commerce were illegal, even directing police to shut down churches, businesses, and playgrounds. Citizens were required to follow health edicts of dubious evidence or merit: schools were closed, facial masks and vaccines were mandated, medical therapies were banned or discouraged, hospitals locked patients up and refused to allow visitors, medical doctors who took personal initiative to find solutions were threatened, and many businesses went belly-up from the alleged “crisis.” In summation, this whole episode constituted the largest-scale program of human rights abuses in the history of the United States. While not all of the debacle was perpetrated by government, all of it stemmed from a massive and illegal abuse of power, largely by state governors and often with the full compliance of sycophantic state legislatures. We are still recovering from the ensuing carnage – the destruction of small businesses, the mental illness of children, the physical side effects of dubious mainstream medical advice, and the untold damage to our civil life as a Republic of free men and women.

Government has for a long time largely taken over the “education” of our children, and in doing so more recently promotes the agenda of a willful minority espousing unwanted ideologies, coaxing our children to believe not in God or even themselves, but rather to pursue the needs and wishes of government and the collective. When children in government-directed schools are no longer instructed about the history and civics of America but instead the ideology of Marxism; or that the color of our skin is more important than the content of our character; or that our biological reality must be subordinate to the fantasies of transhumanists; or that the imagery and prayers of faith are somehow offensive or even hateful: then it is past time to abandon such “education” as propaganda, disinformation, and indoctrination. Government control over childhood development is a recipe for totalitarian dystopia, and we are unfortunately well along this path of destruction.

Government taxes the American population punitively and unfairly, in a system of laws and regulations so convoluted that an enormous private industry exists solely to interpret and advise citizens and businesses as to how to comply. Worse is the complexity and obfuscation by which governments account for their seizure, and the indifference by which they freely spend and frequently waste the resources. At the federal level, the spigot of dollars to fund the endless appetite of Leviathan can never be turned off; it is an unending flow from the masters of the Federal Reserve, requiring an army of individuals permanently collecting data and reassessing schemes for defining how much money actually exists, how much prices have risen, how much less purchasing power each dollar allows, and how the entire monetary tower of Babel can be maintained and forever expanded. Lost in all of that is any hint of respect for the individual American citizen, who ultimately pays for every whim and indulgence of this monstrous (and mostly unconstitutional) enterprise masquerading as the US federal government.

As free citizens of the United States of America, I urge my fellow Americans to stand with me and with all of us who respect the principles of human rights for which our nation was founded. Although much has been lost, our Constitution when correctly understood still codifies a Republic based on the principle of maximal and equal rights, as I have described in this Declaration. What is needed is for men and women to actually follow the Law, and therefore to begin to take steps to dismantle all the illegal structures and practices of our federal and state governments that are inconsistent with the principle of maximal and equal rights, and therefore reform and re-establish our Republic for a better future, a future that recognizes and respects equal and maximal liberty and justice for all.