One of our unalienable rights as U.S. citizens is the pursuit of happiness. Unalienable rights come from our Creator.
Recently, I have been pondering on the meaning of the phrase the pursuit of happiness. Progressives misinterpret and distort the meaning of this phrase. Liberals tend to think of “the pursuit of happiness” as meaning “happiness guaranteed”. Neither our Declaration of Independence or our Constitution ever guaranteed happiness to individuals. Happiness is not simply an emotion but is defined in terms of living a good life, living life to the fullest extent possible. ”Happiness guaranteed” is an impossibility. For a person to achieve this happiness needs to be both acquired and accepted within one’s own heart and soul. This cannot be given like a gift. When a person earns an honest living, and is able to provide for his or her family that gives a person a sense of pride and accomplishment. That sense of pride and accomplishment may lead to his or her’s happiness.
Money, even having loads of money, does not guarantee that a person is going to achieve happiness. Remember Scrooge? While certain situations and celebrations can make a person happy these moments in time do not guarantee happiness either.
Based on my experience in having conversation with progressives, they believe that the government must be involved to ensure peoples happiness. Progressives don’t believe that they as individuals have the power to choose their own destiny. Liberals believe that they are unable to pursue and achieve their own happiness on their own. Conservatives and libertarians believe that they have the ability to empower themselves, pursue and achieve their own happiness without assistance from the State. Conservatives and Libertarians believe in taking risks in order to achieve success, accepting responsibility for taking those risks, and not relying on the State to bail you out if you happen to fail when trying to achieve a goal, which may include achieving happiness. Progressives think that the State needs to play referee, promote favoritism toward particular groups in our society, rather than be left to their own free-will having the ability to choose which path is best to take in order to pursue happiness, and ultimately achieve happiness.
My hope is that every person may achieve happiness.
Well said! It seems to boil down in my mind to a choice between individual, personal freedom (freedom to choose) and the sacrifice of those freedoms in the hope that Big Government can take better care of me than I can. We cannot have BOTH Freedom and Big Government. We either make choices or the government makes them for us. I’d rather trust myself, thanks!
Exactly blogsense-by-barb. Thank you.
You’re correct that no government can guarantee happiness–for the record: I’ve never met a progressive who argued that it could–but your position that people should pursue happiness “without assistance from the State” puts you at odds with the Declaration of Independence, which says that governments are instituted to secure the right, among others, to pursue happiness. The State “assists” me in my pursuit of happiness by securing my right to pursue happiness. According to the Declaration, the State should come to my aid if my right to pursue happiness is infringed.
Another way of reading Teresa’s post would be in light of the document that she is obviously citing with the assumption that she read the clause you are using to portray her as “at odds with” it. In that event the government’s role in protecting the right to men to pursue happiness individually would not rightly be considered “assistance” the way she is using that word. At that point, it is just a terminological quibble, with you insisting on calling the government’s role in securing your fundamental rights a way of “assisting” you in your exercise of them, and Teresa simply saying “that’s not what I meant to deny by the word “assistance”.
Most progressives I engage with deny natural rights, because it flies in the face of their agenda.
The problem with progressivism is that they try to collectivize everything, including happiness, with people like Cass Sunstein nudging us into accepting their version of it.
What the founders mean was each person can pursue whatever makes him or her happy so long as he or she does not interfere with the rights of others.
I agree with Teresa. Progressives are not satisfied with government setting the rules and being the referee. They want government intimately involved in everyone’s lives, and that was never the intention of the founders.
The problem is progressives devalue what should be valued the most. In addition most progressives don’t believe in God or morality in absolute terms.
I also agree with blogsense-by-barb. Liberty and enforced equality are incompatible. Hayek makes this case quite convincingly in The Constitution of Liberty.
I’m not a political person so I’m totally lost as to who the Progressives are and what they are about so I can’t comment on your paragraphs pertaining to them. But I totally agree with your first three paragraphs.