🇺🇸 Happy 250th Birthday USA!

As our nation’s 250th birthday approaches, I find myself thinking about how profoundly blessed I am. I live in a country where I can freely speak my disagreement with any person, where I can freely practice any religion (or not), and where I am not forced by some bureaucrat into a particular job, house, or marriage. I am free to judge people based on the content of their character and their actions, instead of on whatever immutable characteristics they were born with.

Is this a perfect nation? No. But from my perspective, it is pretty darn good for allowing the millions of people in it, with their different goals, values, and priorities, to live they way they see fit. Think about that: someone who has, for all intents and purposes, the opposite goals, values, and priorities as I do, can live next door to me. We can do so peacefully as long as we both agree on some basics: respect for each other’s property rights, don’t kill, don’t steal. This is what makes the United States of America so great.

And this agreement on basics comes from the very founding of our nation: “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.” (Decl. Indep.). Crucially, when everyone has these rights, none of us have the right to stop the other or claim that one person’s “rights” are more important than the other.