Some time ago, without quite meaning to, pretty much without even noticing it, we seem to have repealed a clause in the Declaration of Independence.

We’ve rarely given any part of the Declaration much more than lip service since it took effect 232 years ago. As a document, it’s never been held to be legally enforceable.

An unalienable right to liberty? For everyone except the Africans and their descendants we maintained in legal slavery for four score and seven years.

All men created equal? All men, that is, except the millions of formally emancipated African Americans who lived under Jim Crow subjugation, also perfectly legal, for more than a century after the Civil War. And except women.

A right to life? After—what? 232 years?—of the death penalty, we scarcely noticed when anti-abortion advocates appropriated it as the watchword for their movement.

But by and large we have striven to make good on the promises of the Declaration.

But the pursuit of happiness? We seem to be running away from it.

Of the rights asserted by the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness seems the hardest to enforce.* It’s only the right to pursue happiness, after all, that the Declaration even purports to guarantee, not happiness itself. And we’ve never explicitly prohibited people from pursuing happiness, whatever social, legal and economic obstacles we might have interposed to their pursuit.

But over the past few decades the idea of happiness as a primary objective seems to have disappeared from among our highest social priorities, replaced, ironically, by a value expressed in the phrase in the Declaration as Jefferson originally wrote it, borrowing from John Locke, “the pursuit of property.“

Happiness is a long-honored value in political philosophy. An entire school of thought, utilitarianism, was built around the idea that any action could be judged by whether its overall impact was to create pain or pleasure—the greatest good for the greatest number. And just recently, schools of economics and psychology—schools with names like behavioral economics, hedonistic psychology and economic psychology–have developed around the idea of trying to measure the effect of this or that stimulus on the happiness of individuals. Many of the examples revolve around choices people make in small matters. One experiment, for example, involved people who chose to pay much more for imported chocolate than for Hershey’s.**

Whatever the difficulties in measuring happiness, there is general agreement on what makes most of us happy and unhappy. Good health makes us happy, bad health makes us unhappy. Economic security makes us happy, insecurity makes us unhappy. Having a home makes us happy, not having a home makes us unhappy.

There is also general agreement, at least among policy makers and opinion leaders, that happiness and unhappiness don’t much matter. Adherence to economic theory takes precedence. So does the smooth functioning of markets. So does not raising taxes.

So we strive for international trade that is as free as we can make it, rather than as good for our country as we can make it, and we stigmatize as protectionism any limits for the benefit of those who must bear its negative consequences. Two presidencies and sixteen Congresses have come and gone since Hillary Clinton’s health care plan went down in flames, without either party making a realistic run at it.*** Everybody recognizes that sooner or later, the total of Social Security payments will overtake the total of Social Security taxes collected. And almost everybody agrees that the answer is, or at least includes, lowering benefits. The consequent lowering of senior citizens’ economic security, the whole point of the program, is rarely mentioned.

I am old enough and have a good enough memory that I am not suggesting that our time is unhappier than previous times. I recall each of the past few decades as being about as evenly balanced between happiness and unhappiness as this one.

But I don’t recall a time when happiness, even the pursuit of happiness, mattered as little in public policy debate as it does now.

But, hey: It’s the Fourth of July. Celebrate. Enjoy. Have a happy.

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