The Phoenicians were great mariners who established colonies and trade across the Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenicians invented an alphabet that was later adapted by the Greeks, whose writings became the intellectual standard for thousands of years.
Trade became a vast and intercontinental system crossing many territories and cultures, and in turn helped to reshape all of them. The trade of the Phoenicians was important for its establishment of the Mediterranean Sea basin as a central powerhouse of developing colonial societies and eventual great empires over the next several thousand years. Finally, both the Lydians and Phoenicians were instrumental in shaping the developing ancient world through their very practical technologies, which had been borrowed and shared with and by other societies. Thus, these often-ignored societies were a significant influence on the developing societies and growing civilization rising around the Mediterranean basin.
One final ancient Mediterranean culture that is important to our Freedom Charters is the little-known Lycian Confederacy. Lycia was a confederacy of city-states in the southern part of Anatolia (modern Turkey.) First referenced in modern times by the French political philosopher Montesquieu and later studied as a viable option for a larger federal entity in republican style by James Madison, this ancient alliance of city-states had representation based upon population size and material contributions. Our House of Representatives in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, an integral part of the American legislative branch was one form of representation adopted from the Lycians. Each state is given a certain number of representatives based on its population size.
All these historical factors influenced civilization and, inevitably, our Freedom Charters because a very large aspect of a free society is economic prosperity. Without it, people become desperate for survival and will look to any person and any means for self-preservation. They will inevitably attempt to liberate themselves from the depths of economic despair or depression through extreme people using extreme measures. This makes economic prosperity a central component of stability and sustainability in a free society.
Private property rights also became a central tenet of our Freedom Charters due to its tangible ability to exercise and display the free will and sovereignty of the individual person. The more property a person possesses, the more they can use their own willpower to fulfill their needs, satisfy their desires, and affect their destiny.
With money, available choices become much broader and higher in sophistication and quality, and the more spending of money in a society, the greater the productivity to meet demands for goods and labor. Laws governing trade and the value of goods and labor are also addressed in our Freedom Charters, as government entities are charged with their taxation and regulation. The creation of money and regulating interstate and international trade is a power given to the American federal government in our constitutional system. Individual states also have the power to tax goods and labor but do not have the authority to print their own money. The ability of government entities to tax income has been a particular point of contention in American society, since the original Constitution forbade it. While those changes came many years after the original framers were long gone, the paying of income taxes by the American population is often seen in a negative light and resented by many who labor for meager and not-so meager incomes.
Work requires effort, and some efforts are less desirable than others. Slavery, the treatment of people as property, became a resulting system by many societies throughout the ancient world to defer the efforts and costs of harsh and difficult labor. With slaves, “free men” could afford to live comparatively comfortable lifestyles, but this comes at great costs. Ironically and hypocritically, our Freedom Charters did not immediately remove slavery as a legal institution. It protected it for many decades, and it was only after the costliest war in all American history that slavery was forbidden by our Freedom Charters through the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Slavery damages societies, their economies, and their moral compasses. It’s a dehumanizing and abhorrent system for the slaves, morally reprehensible for the slave owners, and causes severely restricted or nonexistent innovation and technological growth in society. Slaves have little motivation and ability to improve the techniques of labor, since their existence has been devalued to a miserable state of oppression and mere survival. Slave owners are not familiar enough or concerned with the intricacies the labor slaves endure, so finding more efficient and humane ways to perform that labor is not usually a priority, unless it is obvious and vastly improves output and profits.
The most horrific aspect of slavery is the suffering and impact it has on individuals and families. Loss of one’s individual freedom and family through torture, death, or sale often becomes an overwhelming sorrow that breaks a person’s will to live or to feel. Suicide and homicide become methods of escape for some people affected by slavery, which is a product of the numbing of their human senses and loss of hope. Death is often preferred to life when faced with a life of slavery. General Douglas MacArthur once said that war is the “greatest sin of mankind,” but I disagree. War is always horrific, but in the short- and long-term, slavery is far worse and more shameful than any other human failing.
These subjects and more are addressed specifically throughout our Freedom Charters beginning with the Declaration of Independence: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: . . . establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
