I was trying to figure out what to write for the United States of America’s 235th birthday.

And then the answer fell from the sky onto our sidewalk.

It was a piece of fireworks, shot from a birthday party a couple houses north of ours. It was preceded by a big bang, followed by a louder boom.

Those who watched this week’s Ripon Channel Report know that state law prevents use of fireworks that launch or explode — firecrackers, Roman candles, bottle rockets and mortars — without a permit. Even though they’re legal to buy in this state, they’re not legal to use in this state.

What sort of twisted logic makes an item legal to purchase but not use? The same logic that bans smoking in all public places (including privately owned businesses), yet doesn’t ban sale of tobacco products. That same logic pervades government at every level today, and is utterly foreign to any concept the Founding Fathers intended from either the Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

It is fashionable today to ignore the origins of our country because we reflect poorly on those origins. President Obama‘s comments about whether the U.S. is exceptional or not were, well, misinterpreted, which was partly either his own fault or his speechwriter’s fault. But there is no question that some supporters of Obama do believe this country is nothing exceptional, such as those who try to enforce the “right” of public employee collective bargaining using the precedent of UN resolutions.

Remember, though, that the Founding Fathers noted our “inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” My “pursuit of happiness” was sitting in our front yard reading a World War II book (no “pursuit of happiness” in the first couple of years of the war, to be sure), while our neighbors’ pursuit of happiness was celebrating someone’s birthday.

Or perhaps they were rebelling against what you should think is a stupid law. Rebellion goes back before our existence as an independent country to the Boston Tea Party. Everyone who came (or now comes) to this immigrant country by choice came here because they thought their lives would be better here, however they defined “better,” than wherever they left.

Dr. Tim’s Moment of Clarity points out that if this is not who we are, this is who we should be:

Our founding fathers recognized the concept of Natural Law; a set of universal rights and responsibilities endowed to us by our Creator that precedes any governments we might form for the purposes of protecting and enforcing them. Numbers 5-10 of the Ten Commandments are sufficient for us to live in peace with each other, and most of us instinctively follow them, whether or not we believe in the God of the first four.

When six is the upper limit of our tolerance of things we will be told we can’t do, 2,000 pages of “shall” and “shall not” don’t stand a chance. We are Americans; we don’t do “shall.”  That seems so obvious.

Americans are the perfected DNA strand of rebelliousness.  Each of us is the descendant of the brother who left the farm in the old country when his mom and dad and wimpy brother told him not to; the sister who ran away rather than marry the guy her parents had arranged for her; the freethinker who decided his fate would be his own, not decided by a distant power he could not name.  How did you think we would turn out?

Those other brothers and sisters, the tame and the fearful, the obedient and the docile; they all stayed home.  Their timid DNA was passed down to the generations who have endured warfare and poverty and hopelessness and the dull, boring sameness that is the price of subjugation.

They watch from the old countries with envy as their rebellious American cousins run with scissors.  They covet our prosperity and our might and our unbridled celebration of our liberty; but try as they might they have not been able to replicate our success in their own countries.

Why? Because they are governable and we are not.  The framers of the Constitution were smart enough not to try to limit our liberty; they limited government instead. …

Those who cling to the promise of government ignore its reality.  Which side of liberty are you on – the Department of Energy side, or the Internet side?  Which do you trust to deliver your prosperity – yourself or the government?  Who owns you?

That is the question for our time.  A self-owned person is ungovernable; and ungovernable is our natural state.  Liberty is our birthright, and prosperity is its reward.

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution were perfect documents. Both were written in an era in which the term “all men are created equal” applied only to white property-owning men. And yet the presence of those five words paved the eventual path to the elimination of slavery and the extension of full rights to non-white men and to women.

I argued in the previous blog that the Constitution needs an economic Bill of Rights similar to what economist Milton Friedman proposed, limiting government spending and its ability to tax, mandating sound money, and opening borders and trade. (That last position has become increasingly unpopular since 9/11, and I wonder what Friedman would have had to say about open borders today.) Friedman believed that economic freedom was part of political freedom, and the Declaration of Independence is certainly about economic freedom as well.

Economic and personal freedom are interdependent, as Victor Davis Hansen points out:

Yet there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here’s why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity — in the manner of the French Revolution’s slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity” or the Russian Revolution’s “peace, land and bread.”

In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted “Don’t tread on me!” and “Give me liberty or give me death!” The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively that could an all-powerful state.

Such constitutionally protected private property, free enterprise and market capitalism explain why the United States — with only about 4.5 percent of the world’s population — even today, in an intensely competitive global economy, still produces a quarter of the world’s goods and services. To make America unexceptional, inept government overseers, as elsewhere in the world, would determine the conditions — where, when, how and by whom — under which businesses operate.

Individual freedom in America manifests itself in ways most of the world can hardly fathom — whether our unique tradition of the right to gun ownership, the near impossibility of proving libel in American courts, or the singular custom of multimillion-dollar philanthropic institutions, foundations and private endowments. Herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans is almost impossible — and will remain so as long as well-protected citizens can say what they want and do as they please with their hard-earned money.

That part about “herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans” would be a good description of what the instigators and participants in Protestarama would accuse the state GOP of doing to their alleged constitutional rights to hold up the taxpayers for billions of dollars — I mean, take away public employees’ collective bargaining.

(Billions of dollars, you say? Do the math: The average state employee costs the state $71,000 in salary and benefits. The state has about 69,000 FTEs. Multiply, and the state spends about $4.899 billion every year on state employee salaries and benefits.)

The recall elections are a perfect example of the political left’s contempt for our republic, as in the decisions made by our duly elected officials. (As if we’ve needed evidence for that since the Vietnam War.) Democrats swept every statewide office except one in the 2006 election, and captured control of both houses of the Legislature in 2008. What did Republicans do? They found candidates, generated money for their campaign spending, and persuaded the voters to vote most Democrats out of office in 2010. And like a petulant two-year-old, those whose side lost Nov. 2 refuse to understand that they lost and why they lost. They also fail to grasp that, should their candidates win in the recall elections in August, the GOP will certainly redouble their efforts to make their political careers last 17 months. (Two can play the same game, as Sens. Dave Hansen, James Holperin and Robert Wirch are finding out.)

However, our republican form of government does not guarantee us political happiness. It doesn’t guarantee political tranquility either. Nor does it guarantee a job, government-provided health care, nice weather, etc., etc., etc.  Ben Franklin’s answer to the woman who asked what had been created — “a Republic, if you can keep it” — applies today, and it will apply tomorrow and every other day this country continues to exist. And regardless of what you may think about Protestarama, it still doesn’t rise to the level of the Federalist vs. Democratic–Republican battles, or for that matter the Civil War.

Still, after reading this, you may need evidence that America is really an exceptional place. I pass on a story from Ambassador to Tanzania Mark Green (former state legislator and Congressman from Green Bay), who tells the story of an Independence Day celebration at the embassy in 2008, when Tanzania’s Minister for Home Affairs, a Georgetown University law school graduate, spoke after Green:

After a few brief sentences thanking us for the evening and for the opportunity to speak, he scanned his audience, seeming to single out the Americans with his eyes.  He paused again, and as he did, he suddenly seemed to relax . . .the formality of his position melted away.

“What I would say to you tonight is simply this: we want to have what you have. We want to be who you are.”