Modern Declaration of Independence (For a Different Kind of Tyranny)

I started this one with a weird question for AI: has anyone ever rewritten the Declaration of Independence as a parody, from the perspective of corporate America, since that's really who politicians answer to these days.

I liked the direction it went, but a few prompts in, I realized I was thinking about the wrong angle entirely. This isn't really about corporations versus citizens. It's bigger than that.

What I actually believe: free markets, local and transparent ownership, and family or small business scale are the right way to organize a society. I don't trust anything too large, with too much power and no single accountable person behind it. Doesn't matter if that's a corporation, a government agency, or a lobbying group. Size and distance from accountability is the problem, not which flag it flies.

So I redirected the whole exercise. Not a parody of the Declaration. A new one, for a country that no longer faces a king, but faces something the founders didn't have a word for.

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A Modern Declaration of Independence (For a Different Kind of Tyranny)

When, in the course of human events, the institutions created to serve a free people grow so large, so distant, and so powerful that the people can no longer meaningfully understand them, influence them, or hold them accountable, it becomes necessary to declare independence again.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that people are endowed with the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, and that no institution, public or private, is entitled to unlimited power over free people.

Our forebears understood tyranny as a king who ruled without consent. The nature of power has changed. The danger has not. Tyranny may wear the crown of government or the suit of commerce. What matters is not who holds the power, but whether the people subject to it can understand it, challenge it, and name someone accountable for it.

Of the Two Tyrannies

For decades our political life has offered a choice between two factions who share the same error. One trusts government to correct the market's failures. The other trusts corporate power to correct government's failures. Each grows more powerful by pointing at the other's excess.

When government overreaches, we hand more license to corporate power. When corporate power overreaches, we hand more license to government. The pendulum swings, and with each swing both grow larger and less accountable than before.

We say plainly what neither party will say: government tyranny and corporate tyranny are not opposites. They are the same thing in different uniforms. A citizen crushed by an unaccountable agency and a citizen crushed by an unaccountable monopoly have suffered the same injury.

Tyranny must be redefined for this age, not as the rule of a king, but as the exercise of unaccountable power itself, wherever it resides and whichever party currently benefits from defending it.

Of Local Ownership and Accountability

Ownership matters. A person who owns a home, a farm, a shop, or a share in the productive life of their community has more than an asset. They have independence, and something they are personally responsible for.

We do not ask that every enterprise be small. We ask that scale never become a substitute for accountability. Where an enterprise can be locally owned, let it be. Where a decision can be made by an individual, a family, or a community, let it be made there rather than by a board or agency who will never see the consequences.

Of the Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness was never meant as the pursuit of consumption. It is found in family, meaningful work, ownership, building something of value, and belonging to a community. These things happen at a local scale, in homes and neighborhoods and small businesses, not in the aggregate growth of distant institutions. A nation can grow wealthier while its people grow less connected to what makes that wealth worth having.

Of Our Independence

This is not a call to abolish government or enterprise. Both, rightly scaled and rightly accountable, serve free people well. It is a call to abolish the presumption that bigness is safety, that distance is efficiency, and that unaccountable power becomes acceptable once it wins an election or a market.

We declare independence from both thrones at once: the throne of a state that would govern every particular of a free life, and the throne of a market that would own every particular of it. We ask only what free people have always asked, that power remain small enough to see, close enough to question, and answerable enough that someone can be named and held to it.

This is the declaration we make. Not against a king, nor a party, nor a company, but against tyranny itself, in whatever form it next arrives.