Five of America’s Most Important Foundational Values

Economics Without The B.S.**: 

[**  Double entendre intended.]

I was responding to a post where someone asked what are America's five most important foundational values.  So with the holiday for the Fourth coming up, this is what I came up with.

1.     Our Founders redefined democratic governance.  We are not on the model of an Ancient Greece democracy, not a one hundred percent democracy; but, incorporate democratic elements mixed in with some non-democratic elements so that the will of the people can be formed and expressed in a fragmented society composed of economic and civic behavior which affects the governing process.  Where Ancient Greece defined a direct democracy, we have the indirect participation of the populus in the manner of which we are governed.  In other words, we are dynamic society, not a status quo society.

2.    With that said, our Founders created a fragmented governing structure which avoided the concentration of power in one or two bodies – a federal system composed of the national government with state and local governing bodies, defining a constitutional republic, a representative governing system – to complement that democratic governing process that makes it subject to change; thus inhibiting status quo thinking.

3.    Ideally our primary values are an interplay between individual liberty and equality.  These values can complement one another, but they can also come into conflict with one another.  In other words, the individual, and not the family, is at the core of our basic values.  We do cherish family values, but those are decided by individuals.  I might add with regard to the second point – our fragmented federal government structure between the national, state, and local governments – that the individual has rights, natural rights recognized in the Constitution, that are beyond the reach of government bodies and these individual rights come into play as individuals participate in civic affairs as well as their economic endeavors.

4.    Our Founders permitted an economic system – free enterprise, including the right to property – which allowed for individuals to build collateral and wealth, but also in which successful business outcomes tend to concentrate power.  Our free enterprise economic system co-exists vis-à-vis with a fragmented governing structure that makes it difficult to concentrate power.  This is one other aspect of our dynamic society.

5.    Unknowingly, and unintentionally, but never-the-less still somewhat visionary, many of our founding generations viewed the countryside [rightly or wrongly] as their tabula rasa for creating a “New World”.  In a short time we would come to view ourselves as a vast continental nation with a manifest destiny.  And as destiny would have it, shortly after our constitutional founding we found ourselves undergoing the fortunes of industrialization (which was just beginning to be experienced by other nations) while we expanded over the continent.  Being one vast continental nation undergoing industrialization (unlike Europe, and not similar to China, India, or Russia) allowed us to prosper as one market system which benefited from the formation and deployment of capital wealth.  Couple this with our democratic values, a dynamic political process and society, some struggle, and you have a society with an enormous material well-being, and still viewing itself as a creative leader in the vanguard among others.

 

Comments:

 

1.   I agree those could be argued as 5 of the most important. What I find surprising is that there was no mention of God or Judeo-Christian values, other than the mention of Manifest Destiny, and there was no mention of how Natives and Africans fit into America’s founding values.

My response:  No you did not find those things in my comment. What you find is the mention of individual liberty and equality; and over the course of our history that writ has been extended to include those left out by the Founders. That concept of individual liberty includes how we worship.

I think we are all aware of the shortcomings of our Founders, they were not perfect. I have mentioned many, many times before that by the 1820s the country was changing and becoming more democratic than what the Founders intended. Never the less, as the country liberalized to extend the writ of justice, it was based on what the Founders originally said and reinterpreted to bring it up to “modern” standards. This is the dynamics in our system established by the Founders. We have a system that is open to change. We are not a status quo society.