The great cry of this century is “I have a right to be happy!” The United Nations even made it official in 2019, announcing a Happiness Day for which the declaration was “Happiness is a universal human right.”
It sounds good, but you have no such right. A “right to happiness” is not guaranteed in the Bible, in the Constitution, or on your birth certificate.
Advocates of the right to happiness may be confused because our Declaration of Independence says that man is endowed by his Creator with the unalienable right to “pursue” happiness.
That doesn’t mean that anyone has a right to be happy, only that every person has a right to work toward a life that may make him happy without the government interfering in that pursuit.
The Declaration doesn’t specify it, but the inference is that citizens may not break the law in their pursuit of happiness. So the fact Bonnie and Clyde got happy robbing banks didn’t give them a right to pursue that profession, and the FBI shot them to prevent them from continuing down that particular avenue to happiness.
But the mistaken belief that we “deserve” happiness continues to cause us problems today.
Men leave their wives and children because they are no long happy with the responsibility of being husbands and fathers. Happiness lies somewhere else, maybe in chasing sweet young things who will understand them better and not ask them for grocery money so often.
Wives leave their husbands and children because they want to be the sweet young things again, and they think a life of clubbing with the girls will lead to paradise.
Immature teens think dropping out of school will lead to the joys of “doing as I please.” Alcoholics think one more drink will make them happy. Drug addicts believe one more hit will finally make them high enough. Gamblers think one more pull on the one-armed bandit will put them on top of the world where they deserve to be.
The problem of even pursuing happiness is that happiness is a feeling, not a fact. My feelings of being happy largely depend on what I ate for breakfast, whether my pants fit that day, or what somebody said about me on Facebook. My feelings often don’t line up with the facts.
And unfortunately, happiness is a moving target. What made me happy 30 years ago may not make me happy today, but if I left school or a good job or my family to pursue it, I may be stuck with new problems long after the temporary feeling of happiness has disappeared.
Fed a steady diet of “You Have a Right to Be Happy,” you will soon begin to believe that it is someone else’s responsibility to keep you happy.
Too many children already have the attitude that it’s their parents’ job to entertain them. Too many newlyweds believe that their parents should set them up in luxury homes with all the extras that Mom and Dad had finally earned after years of working. Too many employees believe that their employers owe them high wages, low expectations for production and plenty of time for texting and Instagram.
One frightening outcome of making happiness an entitlement is that many socialist politicians are using our expectations to promise to fix all our problems and make us happy, which we deserve to be. They aren’t able to tell us why we deserve happiness, but it sounds good in a speech, and we vote for them.
The problem is that any government policy based on making people happy is doomed to failure.
How much salary is “enough” as a minimum wage to make workers happy enough to work? That $15 an hour hasn’t done it. Some businesses are still closing for lack of workers. Should government require salaries of $20 an hour? $70? 100? How much vacation time and how many benefits are enough?
How much “free education” will it take to make college students happy, especially those who want to make a career of earning degrees?
How much free childcare is enough? How much free healthcare is enough? How many free cellphones are enough to make us as happy as we are entitled to be?
And what about me? What if paying taxes to make other people happy is obstructing my own much deserved happiness? I could pursue happiness much harder if the IRS would leave me alone!
So I hereby assert my right to happiness and demand that the IRS cancel any taxes they may think I owe to pay for the happiness of all these other people!
Oh, and maybe our socialist friends can get to work on providing me with free cheesecakes for breakfast and maybe some bigger pants to wear after I’ve made myself happy on a cheesecake or two. I think I’m entitled to free big pants, of course, paid for by some other joker who owes the IRS for making me happy.
Hey! With that in view, I’m feeling happier already!
