Is there more freedom when governed by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or by 3,000 tyrants a few miles away?

Does government today remotely resemble the values articulated on July 4th 1776?

When the President of the United States bombs the lawful facilities of a foreign country that pose no threat whatsoever to American national security and does so without a congressional declaration of war as the Constitution requires, when thousands of non-violent folks in America are arrested by masked federal agents without warrants and kicked out of the country without due process, when troops patrol the streets of a large city in defiance of federal law, when both major political parties support mass surveillance, undeclared foreign wars and borrowing trillions of dollars a year to fund a bloated government, nearly all of which is nowhere countenanced by the Constitution, we can safely conclude that personal liberty in our once-free society has been radically diminished and is in the twilight of its existence.

Two hundred and forty-nine years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson was fuming in his rented rooms in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress was softening the tone of his final draft of what would become the most critical document and radical articulation of the origins of human freedom in American history.

The Declaration of Independence is an indictment of King George III as well as a manifestation of limited government and maximum individual freedom. Though the final version dropped some of Jefferson's more bellicose language, the document as we know it is largely his — not only his lofty language but also the three principal Jeffersonian values that it manifests.

The first of those values is natural law. The natural law teaches that our rights come from our humanity and our humanity is a gift from God. Jefferson recognized this when he wrote that we are all created equal and endowed by our "Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Recognizing the origin of human freedom in the Creator and referring to our rights as inalienable expressly accepts the concept of natural law and thereby rejects governmental practices today that regard the government as the fountain and origin of our rights. We know the government believes this because it takes away our rights to life, free speech, religious liberty, assembly, private property, travel, self-defense, due process and privacy every day.