My name is Paul Meaney. I'm the editor of intellectual history at Libertarianism.org, a project for the Cato Institute.

And today, I am joined by Timothy Sandifer.

Timothy Sandifer is the vice president of legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, where he holds the Clarence J. and Catherine P. Duncan Chair in constitutional

government. He is the author of 10 books, including You Don't Own Me, Individualism and the

Culture of Liberty, Freedom's Furies, how Isabel Patterson, Rosewilder Lane and Iron Rand found

liberty in an age of darkness, and Frederick Douglass self-made man. Timothy Sandifer's newest book is Proclaiming Liberty,

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence.

He examines how John Adams and Jefferson

helped shape the Declaration of Independence

and its theory of natural rights, consent, and limited government.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are going

to hear a lot of familiar stories about 1776.

But anniversaries can run the danger of flattening history into slogans and at times

force us to ask hard questions about what those words actually meant.

Tim, your book Proclaiming Liberty returns to the Declaration, not as a museum piece, but

as a living standard of natural rights, political legitimacy, and the purpose of government.

And to start with, I want to ask, after 250 years, what do you think is something that most Americans

take for granted about the Declaration

of Independence? What do most Americans overlook about what it was actually saying?

Well, you're absolutely right that people tend to take it for granted, in part because we are so

familiar with its language that we tend to sort of, you know, recite it without pausing to think about a lot of its meaning,

especially the famous second paragraph about the truths that we are pledging ourselves to

...