Digital rights and data management have found themselves embroiled in a contentious global discussion regarding virtual private networks (VPNs). Governments across the globe have begun to enact legislation against these tools, with some states completely prohibiting them.

They cite security reasons for these prohibitions. But in many cases, banning such tools limits online users’ ability to protect their personal information, maintain privacy, and hold others accountable.

The Regulatory Argument vs. The True Value of Encryption

Those advocating for regulations against the use of VPNs often cite concerns with cybersecurity due to encryption. Since encryption is used by VPNs to hide information, regulatory agencies find it difficult to control activity within their borders.

Companies have resisted VPN regulation because restricting encryption would weaken the entire internet . It is not only about malicious actors but also about ordinary citizens, who are even more at risk.

Nevertheless, an overzealous attempt to regulate encryption ultimately ends up taking away much-needed security from regular internet users.

The Advantages of VPNs

The use of a VPN provides several important advantages to average internet users:

• Protecting Everyday Privacy:  VPNs shield citizens, journalists, and activists from intrusive data tracking by internet service providers and hackers.
• Securing Remote Work:  Digital workforce today is quickly growing. For them, having a VPN to encrypt their data while connecting to corporate servers is essential. Not only for their digital safety, but also for the company’s.
• Promoting Digital Freedom: With the global knowledge expanding, everyone needs access to it. VPN lets users bypass the virtual digital borders in a secure way.

Is There a Need to Restrict Data?

What really drives VPN bans isn’t primarily about protection or digital safety. Many regulatory groups aim to control what people can say, do, and access online. Keeping information restricted is important for those in power.

VPNs break down those barriers, allowing people to access independent news, document what’s really happening, and express their views without the fear of being monitored.

When a government targets VPNs, it creates a digital wall that isolates people from the outside world. Locals stop receiving news from international sources. For journalists and whistleblowers, VPNs are not just useful; they are essential. They encrypt everything, making data unreadable to anyone who might want to misuse it.

Do Virtual Private Networks Aid Companies?

Blocking VPNs impacts not only individual privacy but also how businesses operate around the globe. Encryption is critical to modern corporate infrastructures ; therefore, it plays an important role in protecting the company’s intellectual property, financial, and other internal confidential communications. Global businesses face many challenges without these methods.

If those who work in the company cannot securely connect to external servers through encrypted tunnels, much of the sensitive corporate data is left exposed to both surveillance and localized cyber threats.

Giving Everyone Access to Digital Safety Tools

The value of reliable and accessible digital safety tools becomes obvious as the push to regulate them increases. Everyone who goes online, especially on public networks, and understands the dangers of it wants to keep their data safe and their communications secured. They are proactively searching for trusted tools and try different trials, like a Windows VPN free trial to test things out. Relying on a VPN trial allows you to check what the software offers and make sure your connection is safe before having to make an investment.

How Will Digital Autonomy Look in the Future?

Ultimately, the reason why governments are pushing against VPNs is to gain more control over the flow of information and how people use the internet. This just highlights the role that tools like VPNs have in defending individual data sovereignty.

They are part of the puzzle that potentially enables a more secure and open internet world.

Photo: Kevin Paster via Pexels

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I’m speculating here, but there must have come a day in the life of Donald Trump when he figured out that doing actual real work for a living was hard, and he should do less of it. He began his campaign for the presidency in 2015 when he descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower, where he lived and did actual work at Trump Organization, which he wholly owned and still owns.

Trump was a real estate guy. He built and owned skyscrapers in New York and Chicago and Las Vegas. Building skyscrapers is hard work. You have to go around and get people to loan you the money to build the things. That’s hard work, meeting after meeting, to convince banks and insurance companies who loaned you money before and then lost it when you went bankrupt several times, that you’re a whole new Donald Trump, and you’re worth investing money with again.

Then comes the hard work of building skyscrapers. Many, many, many meetings with architects and general contractors and subcontractors by the dozen – choosing the thug-managed company you’re going to buy your concrete from, who’s going to be in charge of slipping undocumented workers through the maze of immigration laws and systems to work cheap for you…stuff like that. And of course, if you’re the builder, you make the design decisions -- many, many choices of what color marble to put here, what kind of stupid columns to put there, what kind of gold-plated nonsense to plaster all over the lobbies, even down to which ceiling light fixtures you’re going to install and which hideous carpet you’re going to cover the floors of the halls with.

See what I mean? Lots of yelling, lots of stealing from contractors, lots of getting your lawyers to stiff them by filing delay after delay against their lawsuits.

When Trump decided to run for president, campaigning wasn’t real work. Trump used other people’s money in the form of campaign donations, because of course he did, to fly around on his private plane and give one rally speech after another to adoring crowds of people who would become his MAGA faithful. He loved it. He still loves it. Standing in front of people who adore you and telling them any lie that pops into your head and listening to their applause and cheers isn’t working, it’s therapy.

When he got in the White House the first time, Trump did a phony divestment of his interest in the Trump Organization and said his sons would run the firm. Opportunities around the world immediately opened up for new Trump deals without Trump being formally involved, but I mean, if you are in a place like Kazakhstan, and you make a deal with the Trump Organization, who do you think you’re dealing with?

Trump himself flew around “solving” disputes between countries that would be lucrative to himself and his family. There was the famous “deal” he made between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that ended $5 billion in lawsuits and allowed each country to fly over the other’s airspace. Remember that video of Trump in Saudi Arabia putting his hands on the glowing globe with members of the Saudi royal family and then dancing with them? Out of sight of the cameras, he was making his deals.

They paid off. In 2021, after Trump left office, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund “invested” $2 billion with some kind of scammy “private equity” fund run by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who allegedly worked in the White House during Trump’s first term as an unpaid somethingoranother, but what he was really doing was running around gathering lucre for daddy-in-law. Shortly after Trump re-took the White House, Qatar, the other half of the Trump-struck deal between the two Gulf states, “donated” a $400 billion gold-plated Boeing 747 for Trump to use as Air Force One and take with him for his “library” in downtown Miami when he leaves office.

Pretty good for doing no work at all, right? But do you think that satisfied him? Not on your life. This time he became president, Trump was protected by a shiny new Supreme Court decision that immunized him from being prosecuted for doing practically anything as president, so he just decided he would let it rip and gobble up all the money he could while he’s in office. The man who as late as 2024 was calling crypto “a scam” and telling interviewers he was “not a fan” of crypto, turned his sons loose to start up a Trump crypto pump-and-dump boiler room scam called World Liberty Financial.

Trump’s latest mandatory federal financial disclosure form, which ran to 927 pages, revealed that he has made about $2 billion since taking office last year, at least $1.4 billion of which came from “the crypto currency industry,” according to a report last week in the New York Times. $1.4 billion is a lot of money. The question is, what kind of work was done to cause that money to end up in Trump’s pocket and be reported to the federal government as “income?”

The short answer is, no work at all. The long answer is no work at all, too. This is because you do not have to do real work in order to fleece suckers out of their cash when you’re running what amounts to a Ponzi scheme.

The Times reports that Trump made a whopping $636 million from sales and trades of a memecoin called $TRUMP. That’s just perfect, isn’t it? Trump put his name on an utterly useless and worthless piece of imaginary money and sold it to his followers as an “investment.” Over a million people, almost certainly every one of them a MAGA Trump supporter, lost $3.8 billion “investing” in Trump’s scam, which in classic pump-and-dump fashion, ran the price up from a few dollars to $70, at which point the “insiders,” Trump and his family and cronies sold out and left the “outsiders” holding their worthless or nearly worthless memecoins, which naturally have Trump’s face on them.

A Ponzi scheme, like the one famously operated by Bernie Madoff, runs like this: people give the guy running the Ponzi scheme money as an alleged “investment.” The Ponzi scheme guy takes their money and gives them something worthless in return. Bernie Madoff took billions of dollars from suckers and gave them reports of false stock trades in return. Listen to this. Madoff’s Ponzi firm had three floors of the famous “lipstick building” on Third Avenue. On one floor was an actual legitimate business Madoff ran for years as a third party market maker in stocks. Market makers hold specific stocks that are ready to sell and make their profit from a percentage of the “spread” between the price asked for the stock and the price it sells at. It’s complicated, but it is legitimate, and the market makers are a key element in keeping things going by providing liquidity in the market.

That was on the 19^th floor along with Madoff’s office. The firm’s entrance and conference room was on the 18^th floor. On the 17^th floor, a skeleton staff of only a few employees faked the stock reports that were sent to the investors in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. They would watch the stock prices as they appeared on the NY Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ or the Standard & Poor’s listings, they would pick a stock that had gone up, and they would fake a purchase order and a sell order and they would list the profit from the sale or another fake investment into options contracts, and they would list it all and make it look official, and send the paper report to the investor with “evidence” of all the money they had made. Madoff made no real investments, achieved no real profits, and pocketed some of the money and used the rest of it to pay some “profits” to selected and favored clients of his scheme, so they would spread the word and bring in new investors and new money…and on it went.

You will notice that the only real “work” that took place was three people generating fake reports on the 17^th floor.

Trump’s crypto scheme is even better. He blabbers on Truth Social every day, he has people and reporters into the Oval Office and between naps he says outrageous stuff. All of this is reported every day, giving evidence that he is, in fact, President of the United States and his name is Donald Trump. In return, his MAGA faithful “invest” in his schemes, which include another cryptocurrency, a so-called “stablecoin” called $WLFI issued by World Liberty Financial, and Trump takes his cut all the way along the money river. Through World Liberty Financial, he got 75 percent of all sales of $WLFI. He got money by selling his own pieces of cryptocurrency when they were at their highest value. He got money through the crypto firm. Here is a list of what he has made since he took office last year, taken from the Substack report of Aaron Parnas.

Do you see any work being done there? Any meetings with contractors? Even any meetings with his investors, the suckers who gave Trump their money and lost $3.8 billion in the process? Madoff’s investors lost about $18 billion, of which $7.5 billion was recovered and returned to them. Do you think even a dime of the $3.8 billion in losses racked up by Trump’s fans will be recovered and returned?

Trump and his sons and Melania – she sold $6 million in fake Melania cryptocurrency – just sat there and churned money and took profits from trades, profits from fools who invested in their firm, profits from sales of fake memecoins they generated out of thin air, profits from another of the Gulf states, the UAE, which “invested” millions in what the Times called “a stake in the company,” World Liberty Financial.

Crypto is a license to print money. The Supreme Court decision immunizing Trump while he’s president is a license to print money. Putting Jared and Don Jr. and Eric on jets and sending them around the world making deals with countries that want to be on Trump’s good side is another license to print money.

The whole thing is a gigantic scam that lines the pockets of Donald Trump and his family, including Jared and Ivanka. Donald Trump is the first president in the history of this country to take the presidency itself and sell shares in it. If he could have charged an admission fee to the suckers on the Mall who slogged through thunderstorms and punishing heat to listen to his blather and get their lungs filled with the smoke of exploding gunpowder and whatever paper shit they use for fireworks – and who knows, because most of it comes from China – he would have.

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Trump birthed 78 million of them, and he is doing his level best to empty as many of their pockets as he can. They deserve every painful loss they suffer, bar none.

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When Anastasia was in second grade, I chaperoned a field trip with her class to the Smithsonian Museum of American History in DC. This was not the first field trip I had chaperoned, and I had learned that, for most teachers, museum field trips are not an ideal place to teach a lesson. Too many kids, too many strangers wandering around, not enough time, and it’s really hard to get the kids to focus.

I, on the other hand, am a huge history nerd, and I’m very good at getting children to listen to me. Years of retail taught me to project my voice like a drill instructor. Also, children love Ogres.

Two years previously, I had chaperoned Jordan’s class. I had given a really detailed tour of the museum and several fun lectures along the way to a small group consisting of Jordan and about four kids. This time, I had the entire class listening and delivered a lesson about racism in America while we were all standing around the 1960 Woolworth’s counter made famous in Greensboro, North Carolina, when a bunch of Black activists sat down at the “White’s Only” section and asked to be served.

Anastasia’s class, almost all of whom were minorities of one kind or another, was fascinated by the story I told of how some people didn’t want kids that looked like them to sit and eat lunch with kids that looked like my lily-white daughter. And how a group of people refused to allow that to keep happening.

Afterwards, Anastaisa’s teacher, Mrs. Hall, told me that several people had stopped to listen to me talking to the group of seven-year-olds. She was very pleased that the kids got a full history lesson, and I was just as pleased to deliver it.

Fast forward a decade, and the mediocre racist white men of the Trump regime would like to ensure that never happens again. That the only history children learn is white nationalist propaganda.

This is why, in the middle of an economy on the brink and a disastrous mess in the Gulf still unresolved, the regime is going to war against the very same Museum of American History I gave my lectures in:

In a broadside posted to its website just as fireworks celebrating America’s 250th birthday were lighting up skies on Saturday, the White House condemned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing it had become a political tool intent on denigrating the American story.

The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.

What, exactly, is the regime whining about? White people are being oppressed! American history that teaches about racism is racist! Against white people! Because, of course, that’s the (completely fabricated) problem:

Titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report accuses the museum of anti-white bias and of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have shifted the museum’s mission “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The museum, it says, “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”

Fascists are not subtle. When they say our history is no longer a “shared national inheritance,” what they mean is that we are no longer telling history from the mediocre, racist white man’s point of view.

The right has long resented the fact that American education has been slowly telling the whole story of America. The pace has been glacial, but we’ve moved away from “Happy Slaves” to a more accurate depiction of who we are as a nation and how we can be better. This has terrified the right for decades. A history that isn’t whitewashed is a history that does not produce racists.

This, more than anything, is the driving force behind the right’s all-out war on public education. They’re not subtle about the racism driving them, either:

The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term. - Sen. Lindsay Graham

Not too long ago, Moms for Liberty, a fascist organization that tried to seize control of public education before being crushed by the voters, said the quiet part out loud:

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler’s remarks at a 1935 rally on the front page of its new newsletter on Wednesday. The quote, placed directly below the masthead, read: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.”

There are a million different quotes that convey the same message. But they liked the Hitler version the most. Why? Because Hitler is their fucking guy, and returning to a whitewashed version of American history serves the singular purpose of generating more mediocre racist voters who will support the party of white nationalism. They’re telling us, out in the open, why they hate an honest accounting of America.

The right does not want history. They want anti-minority and anti-woman propaganda taught as the truth to children. Children who will internalize the lies and grow up to be mediocre racists who will view actual history as lies meant to make them feel bad. This is how you mass-produce Republican voters.

When the regime falls, a top priority for the Democratic president is to purge the right-wing propaganda from our schools and museums and other public spaces. Because while teaching white nationalist propaganda produces fascists, teaching the real history produces Americans. Americans who see this country not just for what it is but, more importantly, what it can become. The potential has always been there, and mediocre racist white men have been trying to snuff it out since our founding 250 years ago.

It took decades to get rid of the “Happy Slave” lie in schools. We can erase the right’s toxic white nationalist propaganda in a fraction of the time, and we must. We cannot afford an entire generation of children being poisoned by the fascist right. We will not go back, no matter how much the racists scream and stamp their feet.

I remember as a cadet at West Point wondering why the Academy waited until senior year to teach cadets a year- long class on military history. They called it “History of the Military Art.” We called it “Art” for short. I mean, we were there to study to become officers in the Army. You would think that they would start pumping you full of military history right from the start. That they didn’t was always a mystery to me.

Having lived through the 61 years since I entered West Point in 1965, I think I’ve figured out why West Point did it that way with military history. They waited until you had spent three years as a cadet receiving on the ground military training, during which you learned tactics and went through a kind of simulacrum of war. Then they taught you military history, so you could identify all the fuckups in wars as they happened through the centuries.

What kind of insane bullshit were the imperial ambitions of Alexander as he took his armies from Greece all the way through Persia to what is now India, laying waste to cities, murdering those who we would call prisoners of war and enslaving women and children along the way? We studied Alexander’s great battles, and then we moved on through the wars of the next two millennia, all in a semester, culminating with our own Civil War, in which tactics that dated back to Alexander were still employed to bottomless bloody effect, with great lines of soldiers facing each other across open fields, fighting and falling where they stood.

The second semester began the study of modern warfare with World War I, featuring frontal assaults – some with fixed bayonets and hand-to-hand fighting and huge losses – which after a time settled into the trench warfare we now think of as the primary feature of that war. What kind of insanity was trench warfare? Armies facing off against each other defensively, unable to move decisively on offense, the bodies piling up on both sides. Modern advances in weaponry, from machine guns to precision artillery to poison gas to early armored vehicles like tanks, made advancement on the ground so costly, neither side could maneuver and achieve victory.

World War I was just another form of warfare as madness with technology making winning more difficult, not less.

Which brings us to Russia’s war on Ukraine, the World War I of our era. The war, in its fourth year, has settled into trench warfare along a broad, 600-mile front, with neither Russia, the aggressor, nor Ukraine, the defender, being able to move decisively against each other. And once again, technology has stepped in to play a critical role. This time, it’s armed drones that keep the soldiers of both sides in a defensive crouch. In World War I, if you stuck your head up, you got shot. In Ukraine, if you move into the open, a drone targets you, and you’re dead.

Warfare never ceases to amaze in its dark perfection. Every advance is countered – replicated by both sides, deployed with nearly identical tactics, strategy drowned in piles of bodies and oceans of blood. The idea of “victory” in the era since the World Wars has been buried alongside the efficacy of warfare itself. Both Putin and Trump, their egos on the march, have proven that war is not worth fighting anymore. It doesn’t work. War does not achieve desired aims. All that Trump’s war on Iran has done is embarrass him. All that Putin’s war on Ukraine has done is weaken him.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) published a definitive study last week showing that the Russian -- Ukraine battlefield casualty rate is now 8 to 1. Russia has suffered 1.4 million casualties since it invaded Ukraine on February 22, 2022. More than 450,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in four years. During recent months, Russia has suffered 1,300 casualties each day. “Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II, and more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II,” according to the CSIS report.

What the CSIS report does not discuss is the enormity of the problem of so many dead Russian bodies. Every Russian soldier who is killed must be recovered and buried. That is not happening. Facing the deadly threat of Ukrainian drones overhead, Russia has been leaving some of its dead where they lie, letting them rot on the battlefield. Some of the dead Russian soldiers who can be recovered have been buried in mass graves. Some have been cremated in mobile crematoriums. Russia has done everything they can to conceal the extent of its losses on the battlefield, but with so many casualties, and so many dead soldiers, families have to be either getting the news from returning wounded soldiers or reaching conclusions on their own when their sons have not returned after not just months, but years at war against Ukraine.

A dictator such as Putin can handle bad news with repression, punishing anyone who spreads “lies” that are actually truths about Russia’s war. Eventually, however, it’s going to catch up with Putin. Ukraine is killing Russians at a rate that they cannot replace by recruitment or even kidnapping young men to force them into uniform. According to CSIS, Russia can replace battlefield losses at a rate of about 27,000 new recruits a month. But Russian casualties are at 30,000 per month, rising to 34,000 in May and June. There is a word for these numbers: “unsustainable.”

These are damning numbers. On the ground, Russia has been losing territory, about 400 square kilometers recently. Which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that Russia has been able to move its front, such as it is, at an average rate of 50 to 90 meters a day in the tightly contested areas of Pokrovsk and Sloviansk, rather than achieving the kinds of gains it was able to make previously, that were measured in kilometers in past months and years. When you factor in Ukraine’s recent drone attacks deep into Russian territory against oil infrastructure, supply depots, military aircraft and naval vessels in the Black Sea, it can be said for the first time that Russia is suffering a defeat in Ukraine, even though the front lines have not significantly moved in months, even years.

Donald Trump lost his war on Iran for any number of reasons, but a big one is that he made a strategic decision to wage war entirely by air, and no bombing campaign has ever proved decisive in a war for territory. Iran simply isn’t going to give in because they’re being bombed. Trump’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be sheer folly. Iran’s nuclear weapon is its coastline on the Strait of Hormuz, allowing Iran to close the Strait to ship traffic at will.

Game, set, match. Lucky for Trump, because if Iran didn’t have that stranglehold on international trade in oil, natural gas, helium, and other precious materials, the war could have dragged on for months, if not years.

Putin hasn’t had that kind of luck against Ukraine. Four years of stalemate, and this against a country a tenth its size without Russia’s natural resources, population, or gross domestic product.

Wars have this wonderful way of biting those who wage them in the ass. Trump’s copious ass got bitten by his hubris, that he is all-powerful, that nobody can tell him what to do, that everyone has to march to his drum. Putin’s ass has been bitten by Ukraine’s incredible fighting spirit and their rapid development and employment of drone warfare. Russia has tried to match Ukraine’s drones, even using Iranian help to build its own factories to manufacture Iran’s Shahed drones, which are cheap, accurate, and effective.

But not decisive. Putin is left, as Trump was in Iran, looking for an exit that will not weaken himself at home to an extent from which he cannot recover. There have to be rivals of Putin who are just standing there waiting in the wings for him to stumble. Because that’s the thing about dictators: they are all powerful until they are not. Authoritarian states don’t move in predictable ways, depending on the consent of the governed as expressed in political campaigns and elections. Putin’s end could come suddenly, or not at all. In which case, the dead bodies will continue to need to be hidden, the wounded will be bandaged and recycled back to the front, and the bloody stalemate will go on.

As war becomes both deadlier and cheaper, we are reaching a point where war will become either obsolete or everywhere all the time all at once and forever. Of course, in order for wars to be waged, there must be egomaniacal leaders to start them. We know from both reading history and watching the world around us today that there will never be a shortage of them.

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I wrote this short essay about the “pursuit of happiness” for the editorial page of the StarTribune newspaper, where it was published on July 3.

_____

Opinion | What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness?

The authors of our founding document were deadly serious about a goal we might see as whimsical.

By Timothy Taylor

When the five-person committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared it to be “self-evident” that there was a right to “the pursuit of Happiness,” what manner of happiness did they have in mind?

In a declaration explaining why the signers felt compelled to commit treason against their existing government and to prevent “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny,” it seems unlikely that they were foreshadowing the whistling cheeriness of the 1988 Bobby McFerrin hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

When you are announcing that you “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for the purpose of fighting a Revolutionary War, it seems unlikely that they were thinking of the giddy, throbbing happiness of the 1986 Beastie Boys hit: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”

The authors of the declaration — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — were not being playful, whimsical or ironic. They were deadly serious about “the pursuit of happiness.”

Drawing on a long philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece, they believed that happiness was the result of living a virtuous life. Franklin wrote that “virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.” Jefferson later wrote: “Happiness is the aim of life. Virtue is the foundation of happiness.”

Naturally, any self-respecting modern American will quickly stand up and declare: “No virtue-monger gets to tell me what cookie-cutter set of rules I am obligated to follow.”

For 21st century Americans, this notion of happiness as virtue may seem self-contradictory. After all, isn’t virtue almost by definition dry and boring: that is, about discipline and abstemiousness, not the freedoms of fun and pleasure?

But as understood by the authors of the declaration, happiness isn’t about the feels. Instead, in a tradition going back to Aristotle, virtue was understood to be developed through a lifetime of practice. The goal is a deeper and richer satisfaction gained as a person grows into a full and flourishing existence. It’s about taking seriously the idea that you can pursue a version of your best self.

Of course, the pursuit of happiness may not succeed. Real life is messy. Personal goals can change. Families can quarrel. Marriages and friendships can crumble. Health and finances can go sour. Happiness, virtue and flourishing are never guaranteed.

The Nobel-prize winning novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad in 1932 and lived there for 18 years before receiving a scholarship to Oxford and moving to the United Kingdom, offered a paean to “the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness” in a 1991 essay, in which he wrote:

“Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition.

“It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.

“It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Declaration of Independence proclaims the “Right of the People … 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.”

Americans have disagreed for 250 years over how best to enunciate the foundational principles of their government and how to organize its powers, and it seems right and proper to me that such disagreement should continue. But the lodestar of such discussions is that people have a “self-evident” and “unalienable” right to pursue their own concept of their own happiness. The concept was radical then, and remains so today.

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.

The post What Does the Declaration Mean by Pursuit of Happiness? first appeared on Conversable Economist.