Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [50]
Madison also drafted the first version of the Takings Clause of what became the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the legal protection of real property from confiscation by the federal government without lawful justification and compensation. He wrote that a person could not “be … obliged to relinquish his property, where it may be necessary for public use, without just compensation.”7 The final version, of course, reads that “private property shall [not] be taken for public use without just compensation.”8
Locke’s writings were not the only philosophical and political influences in the colonies. For example, especially Charles de Montesquieu, as well as several eighteenth-century thinkers who together make up the Enlightenment, played a significant role. However, Locke was the most prominent during the revolutionary period. Professor Bernard Bailyn, having conducted an extensive examination of the period’s pamphlets—which were among the most important manner of communication at the time—observed, “In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract.…”9
So important was Locke to the founding that it is difficult to imagine what kind of nation, if any, the Founders would have established had Locke not lived. The Founders were enlightened and well-educated men who embraced science, reason, experience, tradition, and knowledge. They were men of faith who preached tolerance, morality, and virtue. They used all these qualities and values to draw upon their collective wisdom in organizing the nation around the principles of natural law and natural rights. As such, they appropriated and ratified philosophical arguments espoused by Locke, thereby amalgamating the philosophical with the political. They committed themselves in the founding document, in revolution, and in governance to a respect for human dignity and life through the enshrinement of inalienable individual rights and liberties; to free enterprise and private property rights, where the industrious not only enhance their own lives but contribute to the overall well-being of society; to a representative government of divided authority and limited powers directed at preserving and protecting the individual’s inalienable rights and liberties; and to a just law applied impartially to all individuals.
Looked at another way, the utopian models of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto could not be more repugnant to America’s philosophical and political foundation. Each of the utopias, in their own way, are models for totalitarian regimes managed by masterminds who rule over men as subjects. The individual exists to serve the state, to be reshaped and molded by the state, and the state exists to serve the masterminds’ cause. There are no inalienable rights, only those liberties and rights conferred on men by the state, should the state decide to confer them at all. The individual’s labor and property belong to the state or are controlled by the state, which determines how best to allocate them, thereby enslaving the individual to the state. There is no impartial law or impartial adjudication of the law, only rule by torment and, if necessary, iron fist to ensure compliance with utopian faith. There is no tolerance for individual self-interest or even self-preservation, for equality in terms of conformity and outcomes