Natural Law and The Constitution

"Knights, the gift of freedom is yours by right. But the home we seek is not in some distant land. It's in us, and in our actions on this day! If this be our destiny, then so be it. But let history remember that, as free men, we chose to make it so!"
--Arthur Castus (King Arthur)

What made the Constitution remarkable was that it was the first government design grounded in natural law. Yes, prior governments such as Rome incorporated features of natural law into its design. But the Constitution of the United States was the first (and only) attempt to express natural law as articulated by Locke et al across the scope of government.

However, the expression of natural law in the Constitution is not perfect. Several parts of the Constitution are obviously inconsistent with natural law, suggesting that the Framers either did not fully grasp what natural law was about or that they compromised their ideals. The latter seems more likely given what we know about the process that defined the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The most glaring deviation from natural law is what today is known as the Three Fifths clause, evident right away in Article 1, Section 2. I want to reflect more on this in a later post, but right now it is worth noting that if there was ever an argument against compromise in political processes, then the Three Fifths clause provides it. The Three Fifths clause treats certain individuals as property and denies them their natural rights. It took the country nearly 100 years to reverse it in writing, and a century more to broadly enforce it.

The Constitution strays from natural law in some other ways. In Article 1, Section 8, the Constitution grants the federal government monopoly power over money. The history of the world suggests that governments will always find a way to devalue money, thereby expropriating property from the citizenry.

The Constitution also empowered Congress to grant monopoly power to people deemed by the government to possess innovative inventions and ideas. While this was done with the stated goal 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,' distibuting legal monopolies shields individuals from market competition, and opens a market for political favor between those seeking special privilege and government officials who can grant it.

One item in the Constitution originally consistent with natural law but has since been bastardized was the muted taxation power of the federal government (Article 1, Section 9). The original design severely limited the federal government's capacity for direct taxation of individuals. This is wholly consistent with the notion of property rights which forms the basis for natural law. The Sixteenth Amendment changed this, granting the federal government with essentially unlimited power to appropriate personal property via income taxes.

Because government officials largely ignore the Constitution today, the extent to which the Constitution aligns with natural law seems unimportant. But that is precisely the point. Our tenuous condition today can be explained by our divergence from natural law which was well, but not perfectly, articulated by the Constitution.

Until/unless we reverse this course, we are destined to meet the same fate as all nations who came and went before us.