We are independent of London, but are we independent of Washington?
Is there more freedom when governed by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or by 3,000 tyrants a few miles away?
Does government today remotely resemble the values articulated on July 4th 1776?
When the President of the United States bombs the lawful facilities of a foreign country that pose no threat whatsoever to American national security and does so without a congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires, when thousands of non-violent folks in America are arrested by masked federal agents without warrants and kicked out of the country without due process, when troops patrol the streets of a large city in defiance of federal law, when both major political parties support mass surveillance, undeclared foreign wars and borrowing trillions of dollars a year to fund a bloated government, nearly all of which is nowhere countenanced by the Constitution, we can safely conclude that personal liberty in our once-free society has been radically diminished and is in the twilight of its existence.
Two hundred and forty-nine years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson was fuming in his rented rooms in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress was softening the tone of his final draft of what would become the most critical document and radical articulation of the origins of human freedom in American history.
The Declaration of Independence is an indictment of King George III as well as a manifestation of limited government and maximum individual freedom. Though the final version dropped some of Jefferson’s more bellicose language, the document as we know it is largely his — not only his lofty language but also the three principal Jeffersonian values that it manifests.
The first of those values is natural law. The natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity and our humanity is a gift from God. Jefferson recognized this when he wrote that we are all created equal and endowed by our “Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Recognizing the origin of human freedom in the Creator and referring to our rights as inalienable expressly accepts the concept of natural law and thereby rejects governmental practices today that regard the government as the fountain and origin of our rights. We know the government believes this because it takes away our rights to life, free speech, religious liberty, assembly, private property, travel, self-defense, due process and privacy every day.
At the outset of the Declaration, Jefferson appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” He could have appealed to the British tradition of individual rights. He could have appealed to the Magna Carta. He could have appealed to numerous acts of Parliament that stated — but pretended — that all men are equal and their rights are natural. But he didn’t. He appealed to the natural law.
The second Jeffersonian value is the consent of the governed. Jefferson argued, and Congress agreed, that no government is moral or consistent with the natural law unless it enjoys the consent of all those it governs. Yet, historians today believe that at the time he wrote this, about one-third of the adult, white, land-owning males in the colonies supported revolution, about one-third opposed it, and about one-third were undecided. The very Congress that declared that no government is moral without the consent of the governed wouldn’t achieve the consent of even a majority until after the war.
Surely, voting or walking on a government sidewalk is not consent. If you think it is, then the victims of 20th-century Nazism and Communism consented to those dreadful forms of government. Of course they didn’t.
Consent today is a myth just as much of government today is a myth. We pretend that we have self-government. We pretend that we consented to it. We pretend that our elected officials actually do represent us. We pretend that we are all created equal.
And we pretend that elections actually do change things in a material and substantial way. We even pretend that we have rights that the government protects. And we embrace these pretenses knowing all along that it is the government that assaults our rights, takes our property and kills in our names.
The third Jeffersonian principle is that the proper role of government is not to give the people whatever they want but to protect their natural rights. Moreover, Jefferson wrote, whenever the government — even one consented to by the governed — is destructive of natural rights, the people may morally alter or abolish it.
That was July 4th 1776. On July 4th 2025, the Jeffersonian principles that animated the just war for secession called the American Revolutionary War have all been discarded. Think about it: Do you know anyone today who has consented to the monster government we have today? A government that claims out of its own belly that it can right any wrong, regulate any behavior, tax any event, steal any property, transfer any wealth, borrow any amount and kill any person — foe, friend or imagined foe?
The former American republic is now an empire, with an annual military budget — one trillion dollars! — that is larger than those of the next nine countries combined; and with troops on more than 750 American military installations in 80 nations around the globe. As George III once boasted of his empire, the sun never sets on our empire.
Empire: That would be the form of government from which Jefferson and his colleagues violently and successfully seceded.
Unchecked government is the archenemy of personal liberty. And a government that rejects its founding values, that keeps persons dependent upon it rather than independent of it, one that recognizes no limits to its powers and assaults the liberties of those it governs should be altered or abolished before liberty’s last gleaming becomes a long cold darkness.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
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