To Begin the World Over Again

FOUNDATIONAL TRUTHS

When in the course of human events, the nation that was once the freest the world has ever seen, whose government—a  Constitutional Republic—was the first and only one in history explicitly founded on the moral principle of individual rights—when that nation,  for centuries the sole beacon for the world’s oppressed—when that nation itself loses sight of what it means to be free and, instead, makes initiated physical coercion and the violation of individual rights a way of life—it is then necessary to restart freedom in a new place.  

We the men and women of [Name] hereby announce that we have given birth to such a place and proudly advance this declaration of freedom—freedom from initiated physical coercion—as its seminal founding document.

We hold certain fundamental truths to be observable and inducible facts of reality:

• that all individuals are born equal in their possession of reason, the distinguishing faculty elevating them above all other creatures,
  
  
• that individual human life—the ultimate value and standard of the good—in order to survive and to flourish, requires the free exercise of our faculty of reason. For, unlike all other creatures, humans have no automatic knowledge of how to survive. Humans must use reason,
  
  
• that the initiation of physical coercion, because it abrogates the free exercise of reason and thereby human life, must be abolished from all human affairs as the ultimate evil,
  
  
• that standing in opposition to this evil are individual rights, which all men and women possess, the most fundamental of which are life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness,
  
  
• that the absolute, objective basis of rights is not an alleged supreme being or social group or government but the immutable requirements for an individual human life to survive and flourish in a social context,
  
  
• that a constitutionally controlled government is nonetheless an absolute necessity, strictly limited to the sole sacred purpose of securing and protecting individual rights against initiated physical coercion,
  
  
• that such a government equally protects all men and women against such coercion and itself uses force only in retaliation against those who have initiated that evil or have threatened to do so.