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… is from page 23 of George Will’s newly published 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility [2]:
Perhaps the most important word in the Declaration is the word “secure”: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Government’s primary purpose is to secure pre-existing rights. Government does not create rights; it does not dispense them.
DBx: Or to paraphrase Barack Obama, “You, you government official you, you didn’t create that right.”
Sadly and dangerously, this American founding-era understanding that rights pre-exist the state is today at least as faded and as dim as is the ink on the original Declaration.