It is never too often to recall these words from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Our Founders stood on principle, the principle of individual rights, and that is why the United States of America became the most moral and prosperous nation in history.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare illustrates what happens when this principle is evaded not just by one side in the argument, but by both sides. As I wrote two years ago criticizing the suit of the various States against Obamacare:

In short, the States object to forcing people to buy insurance policies that those people don’t want to buy. But the States don’t object to forcing people to sell insurance policies that those people don’t want to sell.

Chief Justice Roberts exploited another lack of principle on the part of the petitioners against Obamacare. The petitioners objected to the government forcing an individual to buy something for himself. But the petitioners did not object to a practice just as evil if not more so: the government forcing an individual to buy something for other people, as occurs in the case of a tax that redistributes wealth.

The Declaration of Independence is not part of the U.S. Constitution, but it informs us about what the Founders meant by the words in the Constitution. The Founders never meant for taxes to be used to take from some in order to give to others.

Among the Declaration’s twenty-eight specific grievances against the King of Great Britain, there was no grievance that the King did not provide health care, or food or shelter. Americans did not want things given to them, though those first Americans were immeasurably poorer than today’s ‘poor’ Americans. The first Americans simply wanted freedom. With that simple freedom, behold the wealth they created.

A successful war against Obamacare must be the kind of war our Founders would have waged: a war on principle against more than a century of the welfare state; a war for the principle of individual rights.