America’s 250th Birthday

• On July 4, 1776, the “Representatives of the united States of America” adopted a “unanimous Declaration” that dissolved them of “all Allegiance to the British Crown,” whose “absolute Tyranny” made him “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
• The Declaration famously proclaimed, “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 Declaration then stated that the very reason for the existence of government is to “secure these rights.”
• As summarized by political scientist Donald S. Lutz, the founders of the U.S. considered government to be the “servant of the people,” not vice-versa.
• Those tenets became the foundational principles of the U.S. government, and as the Supreme Court stated in 1897, “it is always safe to read the letter of the Constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.”
• In accord with the Declaration, James Madison — the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights — emphasized near the outset of the Constitutional Convention that the new government they were forming must provide “more effectually for the security of private rights and the steady dispensation of Justice.”
• He then stressed that violations of those ideals “had more perhaps than any thing else produced this convention,” and therefore, it was their duty to “frame a republican system” of government that would better protect the “the rights of the minority” from the will of the “majority.”
• Driving that point home, Madison pointed out that the “interest of the major number” was the cause of slavery, “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
• Thus, Madison and the other framers of the Constitution developed a system of checks and balances on the powers of the government that they formed to prevent the majority from using democracy to exploit the minority.
• Even though slavery had been practiced around the world since the dawn of recorded history, many U.S. founders and citizens fervently opposed it, and in the wake of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 6 U.S. states abolished it within 10 years, the U.S. enacted a law barring the entire nation from participating in the international slave trade within 32 years, and the U.S. Constitution was amended to abolish slavery within 90 years.
• In the 20th century, the U.S. became the most powerful nation in the world and the leading bulwark against Nazism, fascism, imperialism, Communism, and other totalitarian ideologies.
• The U.S. has the highest average standard of living in the world, and middle-income people in the U.S. have higher average consumption per person than the averages for all people in every other nation.
• Contrary to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others who regularly denigrate the U.S. with Marxist class warfare rhetoric, the poorest 20% of U.S. residents have a higher average standard of living than the averages for all people in most OECD nations, including the majority of its European members.
• The U.S. also has one of the lowest real child poverty rates in the world.
• The people of the United States give a greater portion of their economy to charity than any other nation of the world.
• In 2025, Americans gave $617 billion to charity, roughly 70% of what the U.S. spends on national defense.
• The U.S. leads the world in medical innovations, and all other countries benefit from these breakthroughs.
• The U.S. is by far the world’s leading destination for immigrants — with 3.1 times the immigrant population of the second-leading nation — highlighting how people vote with their feet.
• Built on the principles of the Declaration, the U.S. Constitution has become the world’s longest-standing written constitution of any nation in the world, and many other countries have copied its provisions into their constitutions.

So Happy Birthday, America!

Celebrate by watching this patriot paint a gigantic flag in his back yard.