Rights

The Presidents recent remarks concerning his views on why some people achieve success, caused me to think back to my youth and how I felt about individuals. I was very liberal and would often defend unsavory people, by pointing out the deficiencies in their upbringing, as the cause of their crimes. If you told me of a man who robbed and beat someone, I would tell you about his fatherless home and his mother who was a prostituted and then say that if you had been raised that way, you would most likely be just like him. I got so good at this type of defense that I finally got to the point where no one was responsible for anything. As time passed and I became aware of more and more people who overcame tremendous obstacles to achieve high levels of success, I changed my views. The President’s comments about people not being responsible for their own success combined with my earlier view of people not being responsible for their failures can now be combined to minimize the effect of the individual and this leads me to my main point. When we say that it is society as a whole not the individual that determines success or failure, we are describing the view of many socialist. It is their view that the state is more important than the individual and that the state can decide what is best for the country. While this may be the view in other countries, our constitution was specially designed to limit the power of the state and it clearly defines the powers given to the individual. 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. In our country we believe that we get our rights from the Creator, not the government.