Free Enterprise and the Founding Principles Behind American Independence

On this Independence Day broadcast, July 4, 2024, Kim Monson presents two pre-recorded conversations that capture the heart of the American experiment. Jake Jabs, the 93-year-old founder of American Furniture Warehouse, recounts his family’s escape from communist tyranny and his rise from a Montana farm to a billion-dollar business. Stan Everitt, founder of the Legacy Project, breaks down the Declaration of Independence and its enduring principles. Karen Levine reflects on property rights and individual freedom.

From Communist Tyranny to the American Dream

Start listening at 1:47 – Hour 1

Jake Jabs traces his family’s harrowing experience under communist rule to explain why free enterprise remains the engine of human flourishing. His father, a Polish-German immigrant, witnessed approximately 40 million people starve under Lenin and served in the Russian army during the Bolshevik Revolution. His mother’s entire family in Ukraine perished under Stalin’s forced grain seizures. Those firsthand accounts of collectivism’s human cost shaped the Jabs family’s deep conviction that property rights and economic incentive are inseparable from human dignity.

A first-generation American, Jabs grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation as a sharecropper’s son with no running water or electricity. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War, delivering top-secret mail across North Africa with a security clearance at age 21. After a brief stint playing guitar alongside Ray Price in Nashville, he chose a different path, buying a half-interest in a Bozeman music store for $1,500. That modest investment became the seed for American Furniture Warehouse, which he founded in 1975 after purchasing the bankrupt American Furniture Company’s assets for $80,000, a fraction of their $1.5 million book value.

Today, at 93, Jabs still runs the company daily. American Furniture Warehouse operates 17 stores, employs 3,300 people, and generates over a billion dollars in annual sales, all debt-free. Jabs credits his success to reinvesting profits into the business rather than enriching himself, paying employees on commission to drive productivity, and maintaining a passion for offering the lowest prices. His four keys to longevity: passion, exercise, enjoyment, and exercising the brain.

“If you enjoy what you’re doing, you may never work a day in your life.”

Jake Jabs, Founder of American Furniture Warehouse

Property Rights and the Promise of Independence

Start listening at 65:19 – Hour 2

Karen Levine, a RE/MAX award-winning realtor, connects the Declaration of Independence to the everyday reality of homeownership. She observes that the Declaration was designed to set forth the ideas and principles behind a just and fair government, and to break the political ties with Great Britain’s tyranny. Levine warns that dividing Americans into groups rather than treating them as individuals has created divisiveness instead of unity, undermining the very individuality the Founders sought to protect.

Drawing on her career helping families navigate real estate, Levine frames property ownership as a direct expression of the Declaration’s promise. She notes that the Fourth of July falling on a Thursday in 2024 offers families extended time to reflect on the meaning of independence and remember that individuality and unity are not opposing forces.

“And I think what also is interesting is to watch how we have divided our people, Americans, into groups.”

Karen Levine, RE/MAX Realtor

The Declaration’s Five Self-Evident Truths

Start listening at 58:33 – Hour 2

Stan Everitt, founder of the Legacy Project, has spent 15 years teaching thousands of Americans the principles embedded in the founding documents. His approach bypasses the familiar debates about the Founders as individuals and focuses instead on the ideas themselves, examining the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment as the twin intellectual currents that shaped the Declaration.

Everitt identifies five distinct principles within the Declaration, each introduced by the word “that” under “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” He walks through each one: equality under a creator, the endowment of unalienable rights, the enumeration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the institution of government by consent of the governed, and the right of the people to alter or abolish destructive government. He argues that the Declaration is primarily a theological document, replacing the human authority of king and crown with accountability to a creator, and that ignoring these principles explains why the Constitution appears to be violated at every turn.

Everitt draws a sharp distinction between a constitutional republic and a democracy. Citing Ben Franklin’s remark that “democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch,” he argues that democracy is inherently transitional and dysfunctional, inevitably devolving into anarchy and oligarchy. The constitutional republic, by contrast, establishes equal justice under the law through a system deliberately designed to dilute power and force debate.

“So they’re talking about this as a principle of how do we organize our civilization, which is completely radical and completely different than anything that has ever been seen on the planet before.”

Stan Everitt, Founder of the Legacy Project