Steven Hatting of the Washington Policy Center writes that America’s 250th birthday should remind us of what unites us. Then he lists what unites us: limited government, minimal regulation, and private property. That is not a consensus. That is a platform. It is the platform of one side of American politics, presented as the shared inheritance of all Americans. The op-ed complains about partisanship and then defines patriotism as agreement with the author’s party.

The history is no better. Hatting says our nation’s greatest strength “has never been government.” He says this in a piece celebrating the founding of a government. The farmers who fed the world farmed land the government surveyed, cleared, and distributed. The entrepreneurs who built companies did so within a legal order established and enforced by the government. The railroads ran on public land grants. The suburbs rose on public mortgage guarantees. The internet began as a public project. American prosperity was built by people working within institutions that make freedom real.

And the promise of 1776 was never a possession to be handed down like a flag folded in a closet. It was a fight. It took a civil war to make “all men are created equal” mean anything and a century more of struggle to make it mean more. The promise is unfinished. Renewing it does not mean recommitting to deregulation. It means asking who still lacks the equality the Declaration announced and what it would cost to deliver it.

Hatting is correct about one thing. The next chapter will be written by what people choose to do for one another. That has never meant leaving each other at the market.

Anthony P. Teso, Camas, WA