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…

- The Declaration of Independence

The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: sounds good to me. These rights pretty much cover the purview of government, not counting the obligation to protect the biosphere – more on that in a later post. For now I’m dealing with what governments owe their humans. First, some clarification of terms.  

The right to Life implies a duty to protect from harm. Policies that protect the right to life keep evolving in line with what’s possible and feasible. Think clean water regulations or standards of medical practice.

Liberty “consists of doing anything which does not harm others”, at least per the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a document written in consultation with Thomas Jefferson.

The Pursuit of Happiness requires a bit more unpacking.  Happiness was an ambiguous term when The Declaration was written. Then, as now, people argued about what constituted “true” happiness, whether happiness could be stupid or had to be infused with virtue to be the real thing. But the feeling mattered less than the right to pursue it. To simplify a bit, the right to pursue happiness was conceived as a right to do whatever makes one happy as long as it does not harm others. In other words, the right to pursue happiness was (and is) bound up with the right to liberty.

So how would these rights inform the practice of governing?  What types of policies support life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Obviously, it depends on who you ask. And who you ask will focus on different aspects of policy-making. Liberals would likely stress policy goals, while conservatives would focus more on policy-making principles, such as:

Limited and dispersed governmental power: protect the people from harm but mostly let them get on with their lives without interference.

Pro-business: promote the free exchange of goods and services as the engine of prosperity without being naive about its potential to do harm.

Regulatory Caution: accept the necessity of government regulations while mindful of trade-offs, costs, and the possibility of unintended consequences. 

State Rights: embrace states as "laboratories of democracy" that enact and test experiments in policy without directly affecting the rest of the country.

Fiscal Responsibility: assume a "good householder" approach to government finances, with a focus on efficiency, accountability, and restraint.

The Bold Centrist is fully behind the above principles. But they’re incomplete and overwhelmingly negative, focused on the keeping government at bay, functioning mainly to protect liberty but pretty much ignoring the other rights.  

These days the vast majority of Americans consider the public education of children a basic right. Yet this right wasn’t recognized by the Founding Fathers, probably because it was neither desirable nor plausible in preindustrial times. Education was not considered essential to the pursuit of happiness when most Americans lived off the land and children provided much needed help on the farm.

Likewise, a basic right to medical care makes sense now. It did not make sense in colonial times, when doctors were “most often powerless to cure a disease or illness that was destined to take its natural course” (JAMA, 1999). Although the US does not yet have a universal healthcare system, we do have a federal law - Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act - that anyone coming to an emergency department must be stabilized and treated, regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. That law was passed in 1986 and signed by President Reagan – a conservative who saw the connection between the right to medical care and the right to life.  

Conservatives have accepted the right to a public education and emergency medical care. But they haven’t registered the implications of these modern rights. They still seem to think governments must be timid, as if it were impossible to mix fiscal discipline with ambitious policy goals or protect individual liberty while expanding the scope of government. Well, it is possible. Hard but possible.

Ambitious policy goals, conservative principles: that’s the Bold Centrist’s approach to governance. Some examples of ambitious goals:

Universal Health Care: healthcare is a universal right and nobody should become sick or poor out of an inability to access medical attention or treatment. Aligns with the right to life.

Universal Access to Shelter and Housing:  everyone has the right to a space that provides privacy, protection from the elements, sufficient quiet for restful sleep, and sufficient stability to act on long-term goals. Necessary for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Adult Student Basic Income: a time-limited basic income for adults to acquire and update skills. In these days of rapidly changing labor markets, lifelong skill upgrading would support the pursuit of happiness.

As for conservative principles that inspire the Bold Centrist, fiscal discipline is a favorite.

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References: 

Colonial Medicine: The Doctor in Colonial America. JAMA. 1999;281(23):2250–2251. doi:10.1001/jama.281.23.2250-JBK0616-3-1  

Patrick J. Charles, Restoring "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" in Our Constitutional Jurisprudence: An Exercise in Legal History, 20 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 457 (2011), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol20/iss2/4