‘First Do No Harm’—A Viable Principle for Politics?

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Commentary

A couple of months ago, I wrote about various ways that both existing policies and proposed policies hurt a certain number of American citizens. Sometimes the hurt was by design; other times, an unavoidable consequence of the policy.

Question: Are government policies that make citizens worse off justifiable? Is it naïve to hope for a government that has, as one of its central tenets, a principle such as the physicians’ “first do no harm”? (Hippocrates authored the phrase, although in a work called “From the Epidemics,” not as part of the Hippocratic oath, as is widely believed.)

I suspect a majority would tell me I’m dreaming if I think there can be a government that operates on the basis of refraining from imposing some pain, some hardship, on its citizens, but the historical fact is that there has been such a government. It was the U.S. government in the early decades of our Republic.

In reading the Declaration of Independence, as well all should do not only on Independence Day but also occasionally throughout the year, it’s plain that the “prime directive” (h/t/ Gene Roddenberry)—the central principle—of American government was the consistent and impartial protection of the rights of every citizen.

No writer can improve on the inspired eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s words, so let’s let them speak for themselves:

“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,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

There you have a concise but comprehensive summary of the founders’ concept of government—government serving people, not people serving government. Indeed, Jefferson et al. believed that government is allowed to exist only for the purpose of upholding individual rights and that government loses its legitimacy once it begins to infringe on those rights. Today and for a number of decades, of course, we see the glaring contradiction to the principles of “first do no harm” and that “all men” have “unalienable rights,” but by 18th-century standards, the Declaration of Independence represented a quantum step forward.

The spirit of the Declaration was embedded and given concrete form in the Constitution of the United States that was adopted a dozen years later on June 21, 1788. The Preamble to the Constitution made explicit what the purposes, functions, and role of the federal government were to be: “… to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” There you have it: six simple tenets or principles:

• First, to harmonize the peoples and governments of 13 hitherto disunited jurisdictions.
• Second, to provide citizens with equal protection before the laws and courts, never favoring rich over poor, blueblood over newcomer from the wrong side of the tracks.
• Third, maintaining peaceful relations between all citizens by diligently defending every citizen from all aggressions and depredations against their rights, either by criminal individuals or by political mobs.
• Fourth, to stand as one against any attack from abroad.
• Fifth, to take only such actions as could reasonably be expected to redound to the benefit of all American citizens impartially (e.g., delivery of mail) rather than to favor some over others or (as progressives would later misinterpret this) to try to elevate the “average welfare” of citizens.
• Sixth, the recognition that individual liberty is the linchpin, the heart and soul, of what it means to be an American.

The founders clearly wanted a government strictly confined to performing a few fundamental tasks. Just as it wasn’t the role of government to dominate us, as was the case in the “Old World,” neither did they envision a government that would help to take care of us in an economic sense. In the economic and commercial sphere, the American government was to act as an impartial referee, to maintain a level playing field rather than favor some over others. If the people had a need, they prayed to God rather than petitioned the government for help.

Under the Jeffersonian ideal of a government that would do no harm to any citizen, rich or poor, the American people were to be left to their own industry and ingenuity, free to pursue one’s own individual concept of “the American dream.” There was no tax on one’s earnings, thus rendering the government impotent to redistribute wealth. Because of that respect for the right of property, Americans weren’t divisible into classes hostilely arrayed against each other, no perversion of justice whereby government impartiality was replaced by government favoritism. There was no legislatively privileged class, therefore no laws to keep incompetent rich Americans from losing their fortunes or ambitious, productive Americans from rising from rags to riches.

We seem to be light-years away from the original American concept of a federal government whose overriding principle is to “first do no harm.” Perhaps someday, after a federal financial crackup under an unsustainable debt burden or the currency destruction that’s the ultimate fate of all fiat currencies, maybe, just maybe, new generations will learn from the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and devise a government that once again impartially protects rights and refrains from plundering the wealth of innocent people.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.