By: Dave Perkins
Tea Party Tribune

C.S. Lewis taught me a lesson of which I’m reminded almost daily. It isn’t so much that we need to be taught complex new intellectual ideas to advance us into the future; what we need is to have basic, simple, eternal truths repeated regularly to us so we don’t forget them.

Many people I have met in my post-2008 “right wing nutjob” activism phase are genuinely puzzled about what I believe. They have not been taught first principles and they don’t know anything at all about the history that applies to the debate on limited government. They go through the standard left wing checklist about me:

“Anarchist? No, because he has a pocket constitution and says he believes in the rule of law. Nihilist? No, because he’s talking about rebuilding the country he loves, whatever he thinks that means. Racist? Well, he has black friends and black people speak at his tea parties. Greedy evil rich guy? Well, if he were rich, surely he’d dress better. Monster, vampire, zombie? But he seems like such a nice man.” If they are decent people (and many left wing people have genuinely good hearts and good intentions), they just don’t know what to make of me. I don’t fit the template pressed down upon the tea party by the MSM and the panicking politicians of the left and center.

But how to tell them who I am…?

If I sense a genuine opportunity, an open mind and heart, I go straight to a first principle of being human. I ask my new acquaintance, “do you own yourself?” Often they do not initially understand the question and so I ask again, “do you own yourself, or does the government or your employer or someone else own you?” It’s a simple enough question and after the initial suspicion that it’s some kind of trick, the answer eventually comes comes back, “I own myself.”

And we all do own ourselves. It is the principle justification for abolition of slavery. If we own ourselves, then it is impossible for another person to own us.

Then I ask “do you own the labor you can do? Do you own your work output?” Because this is the crucial test of ownership of ourselves. You see, if we own property, the proof of our ownership lies in our ability to sell it and receive and own the compensation for it. The compensation, usually money, then belongs to us, as the property belonged to us. Value for value. But when the property that we own is ourselves, the market value is to be found in the work that we do.

Now I do NOT mean that he who cannot or does not work, is therefore a person of no value. I am talking about market value, the kind of value that others will want and for which they will exchange other things of value. Labor is the part of you that you can sell on the market; it proves your ownership of yourself. If you find that the value of your work is taken from you against your will, then your right (natural right, God given, as the founders would put it) of ownership of yourself is being violated. Your work is a piece of your life, a time-limited life in which only so much work can be done. Taking your work, against your will, without compensation, is stealing a piece of you. Slavery, by definition, is theft of labor. Owning a slave was an economic negative, with the ongoing expense of food and clothing and maintenance. The offsetting value for the slave owner was the work that the slaves could do.

If we own our work, then we can legally exchange value for value, exchange our work for compensation, and keep and own the compensation. And of course, in our historical age, compensation for work is usually money, so – when I work for money, the money is mine, because my work is mine, because I own myself.

This is the beginning of understanding the problems plaguing the country and the world today. If solutions are to be found and implemented, they must begin here, with human ownership of self as a natural, inherent, and yes, God given right. And if my new acquaintance has a functioning intellect, his eyes widen and the questions kick in; how much tax is too much? How do we agree on it? Does anyone have a right to live off the labor of others in perpetuity? What are the limits of government? I am not here today to offer answers to these questions, only to point out that the premises on which they have been answered in the past hundred years are faulty. Today’s leadership on the left, and (sadly) even the center right, ponders these questions based on a premise from which the founders would recoil; that some people have a right to steal the labor of others. Some will protest that it’s only a fraction, it’s 25% or 40% or 50%. Be reasonable, they’ll say. Not ALL of the value of a person’s labor is stolen, just what is needed. For fairness.

But either you own yourself or you do not. Either government is limited, or it is unlimited. Fractional ownership of self, said fraction determined by others not accountable to you, in back rooms behind closed doors, making decisions about how much of your life they will steal from you against your will, is not ownership of self. If it’s 50% today, it could be 95% tomorrow and you would be helpless, because you had long ago passively ceded your right to participate in that decision.

I am a human being BEFORE I am an American. I own myself, and I demand my right to have some input into decisions regarding the amount of myself I reluctantly hand over in order to fund the necessary evil called government. I demand it obey the Constitution, respect the limits the Constitution places on it and live within its means. Most of all, I demand that my government humbly acknowledge that a tax dollar is in reality a piece of life, of MY life, a piece taken from a life that is time limited. I demand to be assured by my own eyes and ears that my government does not regard me contemptuously as livestock, a cow to be milked. I demand my government RESPECT MY LABOR and set about doing its work with a high priority on taking as little from me as it can possibly manage. From here, we begin to answer all the other questions.

I am a human being, and this is my declaration of self-ownership.