Although the Declaration of Independence is not a part of the Constitution, it is nonetheless the foundation upon which the Constitution rests. The Declaration of Independence sets forth the principles that guide our country while the Constitution sets up a system of government that preserves those principles.
The Declaration of Independence states that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and the Constitution was designed to protect those rights from being trampled on by the government. However, today, the idea of “rights” seems to encompass nearly everything from food, to housing, to wages, to education, and the list goes on and on. But, those are not rights. To understand why, Tea Party members need to know exactly what rights the Constitution is designed to protect and preserve and what it is not meant to provide.
As understood by the Framers of the Constitution, a right is something that is unalienable. The root of this word is “alien” which is someone who doesn’t belong to a particular society. In other words, they are a foreigner. To be an un-alien means that a person belong in or is a part of a particular society. As such, they are not a foreigner but a citizen.
In the same way, an unalienable right is not a right that is foreign or alien to us but is something that belongs to us. It is something we were born with and that all humans possess. For example, all humans are born with the right to live or, stated in reverse, no one has a right to take someone else’s life. All humans have the right to live free. No one really desires to be a slave to someone else. What someone produces by their own labor or has legally obtained for themselves, belongs to them and no one wants to have their possessions taken from them. These are examples of unalienable rights.
But, while man has the right to work for what he wants, he does not have the right to have his needs provided for by someone else, yet that is exactly what all government social programs do. They take the possession of one group of people in the form of taxes and simply give it to another group of people who have not earned it. To do that a government must violate the unalienable rights of one group in order to give another group something they have no right to. That’s unconstitutional because the Constitution was meant to protect the inalienable rights of ALL its citizens, not just a privileged few, even if those few are the poor and the destitute.
