Heritage
Seventh great-grandson of George Pemberton of Cheshire, whose rebellion irritated King Charles II.
Sixth Great Grandfather, George Pemberton, received his Fairfax land grant and survey paid for by George Washington, father of the Constitution.
Member of the Sons of the American Revolution as the son of six patriots who fought in or actively supported our Revolutionary War.
Born on the anniversary of July 2, 1776, the day when “America” was born: the day the Continental Congress resolved “these United Colonies are and of right ought to be Free and Independent States”.
Accomplishments and Paradigms
Discoverer and author of the unprecedented, Temporal Rights theory of natural rights. This basis finds natural rights as a universal, existential attribute of all natural objects. It is a secular paradigm showing that the Creator endowed the rights claimed in our Declaration of Independence by embedding them in the fundamental fabric of the universe.
Author of A New Message: A Message of Courage and Council from the Hearts of the Founding Fathers to Their Children in a Troubled Nation. This was an eight-part, Bicentennial series for The Freeman magazine, published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1976. The Temporal Rights paradigm shift came to me as I wrote the second in that series. Ezra Taft Benson, then serving on FEE’s Board of Directors and as Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower, called to express his gratitude for the series and asked “What are you going to do with it?”, a question that haunted me for more than 40 years.
John Howard, founder of the Rockford College Institute, said the series was “some of the best writing to come out of our Bicentennial.” He republished the eight articles in booklet form.
Author of Our Paradigm Problem, the identification of an oversight of land surveyors that ignored their mission as the only people with legal rights to protect the natural property rights of land owners.
Graduated with Honors, receiving Bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics.
Earned a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), graduating in the top quarter of the class. One of my professors, Dr. Clinton Oaks, recognized my talent for deep analysis and handed me this 3 x 5 card one day at the end of class.
Blessed to be the father of ten children, two adopted.
The husband of one wife for over 64 years.
Bio
I am the youngest son of Stanley and Velva Pemberton who taught me all the good ways of life and encouraged me to try any worthy thing that came to mind. My mother often said to me, “You can do anything you put your mind to Sonny.”
Over a half century ago, one of my instructors in the MBA program at BYU made an observation about me that over the years I have recognized as true. He said, “At your best you can be extremely good – you have insight that is unusual and an ability to verbalize your gropings for even greater understanding.”
People will wonder why I think I can, with almost no legal training, presume to write about political philosophy. I certainly cannot write about those issues in the typical legal vocabulary. That is a feature, not a bug, for the following reason. Because I have not been educated in the theories of the traditional philosophers of natural rights, I have been able to discover an entirely new, revolutionary perspective on them. Had I been trained in that subject, I would probably have been unable to see what was everywhere I looked.
I know that I have that gift for searching out fundamental meanings, for analyzing situations and then for verbalizing root causes and their active components. This became clear while I was studying land law as part of my degree in land surveying. Halfway through the course I thought I could see some very universal principles and wrote a short article laying them out in the form of axioms and corollaries. It was published in the Utah State Council of Land Surveyors magazine Focus.
It soon came to the attention of similar publications across the US and was republished in Nevada, Iowa, California, Minnesota, and Georgia. Encouraged by that unexpected result, I submitted it to Gerald McGray, Editor of the Professional Surveyor magazine, who responded thus: “I have perused your essay and find it compelling. I would like to use it right away.” Under date of June 10, 2004, I received a letter from a surveying manager at Moreland Altoelli Associates of Norcross, Georgia, that read in part: “I have read your article, which was published in the Georgia Land Surveyor. I would like to commend you for your deep and thorough understanding of the problems in the land surveying profession, your excellent examples, and your candid language.” My credentials for writing that article were a gift for deep analysis and a three-credit-hour class in Land Law that exposed me to the problem.
My hope is to use this gift of insights in the service of my fellow beings – to help us all to better discern between right and wrong and good and evil. I will focus on the nature of man and his universe and thus on the political and religious forces that are determining our present state of affairs in the world. My perspective will typically be in a wholly secular context for that is the assignment I have accepted — to show that man has inherent and inalienable rights without any appeal to their origin in deity, and then to demonstrate the effects of that fact upon the basis of the issues of the day. Simultaneously, I strive to be a practising Christian and attend my church regularly while serving in various leadership capacities. In fact, the whole truth of the matter is that most, if not all, of my success as a discoverer of new insights can be traced to my habit of praying about everything.
When I wrote the A New Message series for the Foundation for Economic Education’s Freeman magazine, I received a note from John Howard, then President of the Rockford College Institute: “I think this commentary will do more to stimulate thinking about our nation’s founding than any other Bicentennial writing I have seen.”
He soon asked for permission to republish the series in booklet form. I agreed, and the Institute printed a few thousand booklets like the one pictured here. There are still a few copies of this floating around on Amazon.
A Bit of Auto-Biography
I was raised among orchards and farm animals: chickens, pigs, cows and a horse. My parents were Presbyterians and Republicans, both of which I had to take apart piece by piece before I could be content with them. I did most of that while attending three years at Washington State College (WSC, now WSU) in Pullman, Washington State.
At WSC, I took classes in logic, religion, and philosophy. My first major was Electrical Engineering but those studies were too superficial for me; I wanted to understand how the engineering equations were derived. So I changed my major to Physics and Math.
Marriage and Family
I married Charlet, a wonderful, smart, perky redhead in 1961, and we decided to have eight children. We thought good citizens would be our best legacy to give the world. We had eight, then adopted two more. So we have observed nearly two hundred years of child maturation. Over the years, we have also taken in others who just needed a place to live for a while. One was a recovering drug addict who proved that hard-core addiction can be overcome. It was a joy to have her under our roof.
My chosen career was computer systems design and programming with a few years of electronic engineering in the middle.
With all those children to raise, I was constantly looking to improve my income which took us to Utah, Arizona and California. I did OK, earned a million dollars and spent it all on my wife and children. My articles on the Constitution for our nation’s bicentennial came to the attention of Theodore Merritt, the founder of Liberty Village in Flemington, New Jersey, where I served as Executive Director.
Our self-inflicted “poverty” gave us little choice for family vacations other than hiking and back packing, which we often did. Our favorite was a two week, 65-mile trek to the top of Mt. Whitney in the High Sierra mountains of California.
In the late 1990’s, we lived a mile from the Pacific in Copalis Beach, Washington where I wrought computer software for Timberland Bank and Charlet did wetlands delineations on the Ocean Shores sand spit. I envied her work – half of her time was field work and half brain work. So a few years later I took a degree in Land Surveying from Salt Lake Community College and earned a 3.97 gpa. I worked for a while as a chain man and earned enough to pay for that degree. I loved the work! It was both mentally and physically challenging. Besides that, it let me check off one more box on my followership of Thomas Jefferson, one of my top heroes.
Retirement
We both “retired” on May 27, 2005, and headed for Alaska with our 30-foot Airstream, where we fell into a position with Alaska State Parks, living in a cabin on Redshirt Lake northwest of Anchoragein the Nancy Lakes area. We had to backpack our laundry and groceries three miles every week. Our job was servicing four rental cabins on the lake. We especially enjoyed fixing and painting them, neither of which we were expected to do – we just liked doing.
My wife Charlet has been a treasure, a joy and a constant stimulus to keep me active, which I have deeply appreciated. We recently completed a major remodel of the 1937 house we call home – finishing the basement, adding a complete summer kitchen and bath there and a half bath on the attic level between two bedrooms, replacing all the plumbing and 95% of the electrical system. The year 2021 found us in Independence, Kansas doing a restoration of a 1905, two-story brick home. By 2024, we realized a lifetime dream of living off-grid in a beautiful forest.
Now I’m writing again. One of my goals is to help bring peace between the left and the right. Their conflict seems centered on religion so church and state became a focal point. Jefferson’s alleged wall is based on a false dichotomy, which explains why there is no progress in this struggle. In fact, because it has been universally accepted, it has created a de facto state-supported and enforced religion.
For the last several years I have focused on the origin of the authority vested in the laws of the universe, or in the laws of nature. I found that authority we call natural rights, in the fundamental structure of the universe. These Temporal Rights are the authority empowering John Locke’s natural rights, which became the foundation of our Republic. The search began when I felt impressed to understand the full implications of an answer to a prayer for a secular basis for natural rights that came to me as I wrote the second essay of A New Message. I was given to know that the beaver has the natural right to cut down trees, and the tree has the right to mine the soil and sunlight and compete with others in the process. .
This perspective, being secular, is not subject to dismissal by the nonbelievers as an old fable and an antiquated tradition. It is, in fact, a revelation of the authority that empowers the laws of the universe.
If you would like to contact me, here’s the place.
Jackson Pemberton
April 11, 2018 [Updated 2021] [Updated 2025]
