This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact The Epoch Times Reprints.
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the University of Texas at Austin, in Austin, Texas, on April 15, 2026. AP Photo/Eric Gay
Earlier this year, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas delivered a speech in Texas in which he warned of an existential threat to the revolutionary principles that animated the birth of our republic. Those principles, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution, are these: that all men are created equal, that rights are inherent in the individual and not something bestowed by government, and that the primary purpose of government is to uphold those rights impartially.
Unfortunately, some time in the second century of the life of our country, millions of Americans underwent a profound, seismic attitude shift. Seduced by an ideology and political movement that became known as progressivism, Americans embraced a vision of government that is fundamentally incompatible with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and ultimately our freedom and way of life. Thomas related how progressives favor rule by experts—government-led social engineering—and believe that those experts are so much wiser and more enlightened than the masses of citizens, that their brilliant plans should not be thwarted by outdated beliefs about individual rights.
In his speech, Thomas didn’t go so far as to describe with what actual practices and policies progressivism began to undermine the Declaration’s principles of inalienable individual rights, the equality of all before the law, and the Constitution that was meant to uphold those principles, so I will address that now.
As I have written before, the philosophy of progressivism was imbued with a spirit of “meliorism”—the doctrine that one of the purposes of government is to improve the economic well-being of citizens by giving them financial assistance. The Founding Fathers were decidedly not meliorists. In blunt, unmistakable language, James Madison, a principal architect of the Constitution and our fourth president, declared, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” The founders weren’t anti-charity; they just believed that charity belongs properly to the private sector.
In the late 19th century, President Grover Cleveland reiterated the Founders’ vision of limited government, writing in a veto message that there is no constitutional authority for the federal government to bail out a select group of citizens at a time of need and that “though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.”
And why should the Government not support—i.e., give money to—anyone?
This takes us to the heart of why progressivism is essentially incompatible with our Declaration and Constitution. It’s because the government has no wealth of its own, it can spend only what it first takes from people in the private sector. Thus, any government welfare program is necessarily a wealth-redistribution program: Government takes from A and B to give to C, D, et al. In other words, instead of government protecting and upholding the property rights of all citizens impartially, political office-holders determine that certain citizens have a right to a portion of their fellow citizens’ property—that A’s and B’s rights are superior to C’s and D’s.
As Thomas put it in his stirring speech, “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the Government.”
Progressivism is clearly the antithesis of Americanism. By asserting that individual property rights are not inalienable, but that a governing majority may apportion property as it sees fit, progressives opened the floodgates to all sorts of economic, social, and political chaos, which are, to use Thomas’s word, retrogressive.
Indeed, from the morally debased premise that rights are malleable and held only at the sufferance of those holding political power, the political system inexorably descends into the sordid business of deciding whose “rights” outweigh those of others. Cynical politicians, posing as charitable rescuers of those in need, progressively chip away at the property rights of their fellow citizens and use the money to buy votes from citizens who are happy to believe that it is “social justice” that entitles them to have a share of their more productive and prosperous neighbors’ property.
Historically, progressivism has created a slippery slope on which vote-buying politicians have repeatedly legislated increases of existing benefits and the addition of an ever-widening list of benefits targeted to an ever-widening circle of recipients. President Franklin Pierce was alert to the slippery slope, opposing federal aid to the relatively few indigent insane citizens with the astute warning, “If Congress may and ought to provide for any one of these objects, it may and ought to provide for them all.”
Indeed, the progressive redistribution of wealth has snowballed over the decades so that today the U.S. Treasury is nearly $40 trillion in debt—several times that amount if you factor in the unfunded liabilities of federal entitlement programs. Our society is riven with a perverse class warfare in which progressive demagogues denigrate and persecute the wealthy who are the engines of economic progress, the benefactors who increasingly enrich society. And all the while, progressives push for ever-larger diminutions of individual property rights and ever-more government control over the property of its citizens.
The progressive goal of reapportioning rights and asserting government control over ever-increasing swaths of the economy violates not only the Declaration—our collective statement of national values and aspirations—but also has shredded our Constitution. Government wealth-redistribution programs do violence to the following amendments to the Constitution:
The 10th Amendment. One of the most ignored amendments in the original Bill or Rights, the 10th explicitly limits the legitimate exercise of government power to those functions specifically enumerated in the text of the Constitution. Nowhere does the Constitution mention the economic well-being of individual citizens or stipulate that the federal government should provide for the economic needs of the people. The term “welfare” occurs in the Preamble of the Constitution, but the plain meaning is that promoting the “general welfare” means performing tasks that can benefit all Americans impartially, such as keeping the country safe from foreign enemies, and not “special interest welfare,” whereby some benefit at the expense of others.
The Fifth Amendment. Here we find an explicit statement reinforcing the sanctity of property rights. The only authority for the state to take even part of anyone’s property is in retribution for crimes that person has committed against the rights of fellow citizens. There is no authorization here for a democratic majority to appropriate any portion of the property of any American citizen for the purpose of benefiting special interests.
The 13th Amendment. What? Isn’t this the anti-slavery amendment? Yes, it is. And one definition of slavery is when one person is compelled to work for the benefit of another or, as the amendment phrases it “involuntary servitude.” Welfare programs, based on the redistribution of wealth from one citizen to another without compensation, are certainly not as grotesquely savage as chattel slavery, but they are still ugly abuses of government power that violate one of the basic rights of individuals.
The 14th Amendment. When this amendment asserts that no “State [shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” there was no hidden implication here that it was a privilege of the federal government to commit those same crimes against individual rights. As with the Fifth Amendment, “due process of law” refers to judicial proceedings pertaining to injuries that one person inflicts upon another, and not to democratic politics whereby a majority can vote to whittle away individual rights. More obviously, one can hardly say that a welfare program that takes property from some citizens to give it to others is providing “equal protection of the laws” to citizens.
The First Amendment. This may be the most controversial entry in this list, but please hear me out. If you ask people why the federal government should provide financial benefits to select citizens, many would respond, because it is the charitable thing to do, and we Americans should be charitable. And why should we be charitable? For many, it is because their religion teaches them that they should be charitable. Fine. Americans have always been free to bestow charity on others, and millions upon millions have done so over the course of our history. But for the religious doctrine of charity to be formalized and institutionalized in government welfare programs amounts to an establishment of religion, which the First Amendment prohibits. Even if a wealthy taxpayer supports a welfare program because he or she wants to do something to help others, why should a political majority determine who gets how much aid? Such programs interfere with the free exercise of religion by usurping individual believers’ personal preferences and choices for where and how much charity to bestow by taxing money that the citizen could otherwise deploy as he or she chooses.
Which will prevail? The American vision of equality before the law, or the progressive vision of government exerting increasing power over property and wealth? Thomas made no predictions in his address. He just made plain that Americanism and progressivism cannot coexist indefinitely, for they are fundamentally incompatible. He called for a rebirth of dedication to our country’s noble ideals, and encouraged us to be courageous. But millions of Americans are addicted to government as Santa Claus, and there is no sign on the horizon that runaway government spending will be brought under control.
As we celebrate our country’s 250th birthday, we need to rededicate ourselves to the Founders’ vision. Otherwise, the contest between progressivism and Americanism will be won by the progressives, who will leave us with a bankrupt, ruined economy, a tremendous diminution of rights, and the loss of the greatest system of government in humankind’s long history.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Mark Hendrickson is an economist who retired from the faculty of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he remains fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom. He is the author of several books on topics as varied as American economic history, anonymous characters in the Bible, the wealth inequality issue, and climate change, among others.
