On July 9, 2012, Stuart Shapiro writes on Alan.com:
For decades, conservatives have been clamoring for adhering to the original intent of the Constitution. Liberals have too often ceded ground by arguing for a more flexible interpretation. The framers were not uniformly in favor of limited government and did not necessarily intend for the Constitution to lock us into such a vision. William Forbath explains:
That’s a major failing, because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers’ generation. None other than Madison was among its prominent expounders — in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.
Likewise, many framers of the Reconstruction amendments held that education and “40 acres and a mule” were constitutional essentials that Congress must provide to ex-slaves. They also held that equal rights and liberty for white workingmen required a fair distribution of initial endowments, including free homesteads and free elementary and secondary education, along with land-grant-funded state colleges.
And, of course, one of the most prominent founders, Alexander Hamilton, was an advocate of central banking and an a government that promoted industry. There is no reason to think that original intent favors a conservative vision of government. The founders were too smart for that.
The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Democratizing economic power will return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion we had in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth.