by Dr Harold Pease
Everyone recognizes natural law in science. Eat too many cherries have diarrhea. Run naked in the sun too long have sunburn. Jump from an airplane without a parachute have broken bones. But are there natural laws that apply in government as well regardless of culture, language, race, wealth, or time?
I ask my female students if it is ever right, under any circumstances, for someone to rape them even if the law said that it is okay. No woman has said yes to that question or ever will. Then there must be absolute truths—natural law if you will—and law before there was written law.
During the 1970’s, Montana had no daytime freeway speed limit because natural law says that people will drive the speed to which they feel safe, and they did. It worked for a decade. Speed signs simply read, “Reasonable and Prudent.” Today they have speed limits because the Federal Government mandated their returning to them or forfeit any federal highway improvement funds. They complied.
Cicero, a Roman philosopher and politician prior to the time of Jesus Christ, was first to put the principle of natural law in print when he said. “Nor may any other law override it, nor may it be repealed as a whole or in part… Nor is it one thing at Rome and another at Athens, one thing today and another tomorrow, but one eternal and unalterable law, that binds all nations forever.”
The Founding Fathers identified three inalienable rights based upon natural law in The Declaration of Independence—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The U. S. Constitution, using the same base, finally harnessed government as never before enabling, as long as it was followed, the freest nation in all history. Limiting federal government power enabled the people to gravitate to that which they did best which Adam Smith explained, “unintentionally promoted the economic welfare of the nation as a whole.” The world was presented with the first “rich” nation where a vast majority of the people were rich in the eyes of the vast majority of the rest of the world. Simply said, man was “led by an invisible hand (natural law) to promote an end which was no part of his intention” which brought wealth. Instead of the ancient destructive philosophies of shared poverty, it made us stunningly wealthy. Natural law, moreover, was also the base for most of the Bill of Rights.
Consider the following natural laws hypothesized by the great French philosopher Frederic Bastiat. “Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims.” When he can, man prefers to “live and prosper at the expense of others” this is a derivative of a higher natural law that postulates that man’s “instincts impel him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.” “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” Consequently the “safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.” When the function of government changes from protecting property to violating it “then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.” In which case, “political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing.” Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent. The law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. “Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in.”
There exists a cause and effect relationship in matters of governance that is predictable, as for example, “vengeance begets vengeance. “ All forms of government and governmental matters ought to be molded around the concepts of natural law, and human nature. They cannot be avoided nor defied without a natural consequence. As it now stands, and has for much of the six thousand years of recorded history, matters of government are structured or enacted oblivious to them. Conversely, they prefer to defy or deny them. We want gratification without consequence.
An in depth study of the writing of the Founding Fathers justifies the statement that they collectively had a much greater understanding of human nature and cause and effect relations than has any group ever assembled in the past or present. Yet the Constitution and their writings are hardly considered today, hence we have lost an awareness of the importance of this understanding. The inevitable consequence of this neglect will be the loss of individual liberty even with public support. Our ignorance is killing us. As said in the movie Star Wars, “So this is how liberty is lost, with thunderous applause.”