“In the beginning, all the world was America.” -John Locke
This is an interesting quote. And it speaks to a very important fact: America is not a nation. Not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway.
Instead, America is an idea.
John Locke was a 17th-century English philosopher. He’s considered one of the most influential of Europe’s Enlightenment thinkers.
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government were foundational to the early American political philosophy. The ideas Locke presented directly influenced the American founders. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton each said that Locke had an outsized impact on their thinking.
And that’s key. America was conceived from thought. From an idea. That makes it fundamentally different.
Throughout history, nations typically consisted of singular groups of people. They were people who shared similar genetics, a common culture, and of course a common language. There are some exceptions to this. But generally nations boasted a common heritage.
America is a land of immigrants. The earliest immigrants came from western Europe. But by the 20th century, immigrants from all over the world flocked to America’s shores.
As such, Americans do not share similar genetics or even a common culture with one another. Bill Bonner eloquently pointed this out in his book The Idea of America. Bonner noted that there are few similarities between the mossbacked Episcopalians of the Virginia Tidewater, the holy rollers of east Texas, and the Muslims of east Harlem.
Thus, Americans were never united by blood, culture, or religion. Instead, the only thing Americans shared was an idea.
That idea is this: you can be whatever you want to be in America. Here you have the opportunity to write your own story – regardless of where you come from.
Every year at this time I’m reminded of the story of the Aide family. They were a Lebanese family who moved to America early in the 20th century. They came here with nothing but a few dollars and the will to create a better life for their descendants.
The family immigrated through Ellis Island in the New York Harbor. Then they made their way down the east coast. They eventually settled in the mountains of eastern West Virginia.
There, they opened discount stores in several of the neighboring towns. These discount stores were small Walmart’s decades before any Walmart locations opened in the region.
It was brilliant. This family figured out how to stock hard-to-find goods cheaply. Then they offered those goods at low prices to the locals.
Mr. Aide also had the foresight to install arcades and movie rental operations in each store. That attracted the kids… which made the parents something of a captive audience. They brought the kids to the arcade often. And then the parents had nothing to do except shop while their kids played for an hour or so.
What’s more, the Aides leveraged the success of their discount stores perfectly. They used their revenue to buy and develop the commercial real estate around their stores. That allowed them to bring in anchor tenants – often grocery stores and drug stores.
This drove even greater traffic to their own discount stores. And it created another revenue stream as well. The Aides family generated strong rental income from their anchor tenants.
Naturally, the family educated their children on the workings of their family business. One of the sons went off to college and then business school with the intention of taking over upon his father’s retirement.
When that son came back from business school, he spent some time shadowing his dad in the business. He noticed that everything was low-tech. This included how his dad manually handled the accounting.
This prompted the highly-educated son to speak up. “Dad, how do you expect the business to run like this? You have to get more sophisticated if you want to maximize your profits.”
The father looked up from his desk and thought for just a moment.
Son, when your mother and I came to this country we had nothing but two dollars and the shirts on our backs. This business enabled us to carve out a comfortable life for ourselves and for you kids. In fact, it put you kids through college and set you up for a lifetime of opportunity. For us, your mom drives a Cadillac every day and I take off early every Friday to go play golf.
The way I see it, we take all these blessings and we subtract from them the two dollars and the shirts we came here with… that’s how I calculate our profit.
I love it. And I should point out that this is a true story.
The Aide family business still runs today. Their Aide’s Discount Stores all closed down a couple decades ago. They couldn’t compete when Walmart decided to enter the region. But the Aides family still owns and manages the commercial real estate developments where their stores once stood.
That’s the idea of America. It’s all about opportunity. About making something from nothing.
And that opportunity is only possible in a land that respects individual liberty. That’s what the American experiment was about.
The best of the American founders understood this well. They were adamant that the sole purpose of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of individuals. That’s it and nothing more. If we read Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, it spells this out in no uncertain terms.
Of course, those ideals are no longer held sacred today.
A century of public education has convinced many Americans that government should be all things to all people. But it can’t. Tomorrow we’ll look to Colonel David Crockett, of frontier fame, for why that is.
-Joe Withrow
P.S. For those who find little-known historical events and figures interesting, I would highly recommend Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom.
Tom’s program provides a world-class education on both subjects. And it does so in a compelling and entertaining way. No kidding – I’ve learned far more from Liberty Classroom than I ever did in seventeen years of public education.
If you would like to review Liberty Classroom’s course listings, just go right here: Tom Woods Liberty Classroom Course Listing