> If the US were founded on this principle… it would have been part of the constitution.

If that were true, we wouldn't have had the first block of amendments. There's plenty of stuff that didn't make it into the original constitution because the founders thought it was obvious.

There's a long standing philosophy that pretty much any and all ideas in the founder's heads are viable as founding principles. Otherwise what good is mining their journals and letters and their acquaintances journals and letters in a continuous attempt to understand what they thought was critical for a society to function.

This largely ignores the rest of society and what they were thinking. From the first perspective, these are all ideas that got smuggled in.

It also ignores the significant disagreements the founders had amongst themselves.