Every July 4th I think the same thing: The audacity. The nerve. The sheer cojones that went into our founding fathers cutting the tether to King and country and launching Democracy 1.0 without so much as a round of beta testing.

We wouldn’t do it like that nowadays. We’d know better. The Declaration of Independence was basically the work of one overachieving focus group. There were no control groups, no cost-benefit analyses, and a shocking lack of Powerpoint presentations [I’ve read that Benjamin Franklin actually prepared a nifty one entitled “Effective Team Building and Post-Colonial Management Techniques” with clear bullet points and amusing clip art, but he never got a chance to present it].

No, we’d have done it differently. For one, slave-related sex scandals would’ve destroyed Thomas Jefferson’s credibility long before the writing of the Declaration, and the task would have fallen into the hands of a more reliable and moderate patriot. And that document would have been thoroughly vetted by a legal staff to ensure that our nascent revolutionaries were protected from lawsuits from both the British and the new Americans. The resulting Declaration would have been 12,000 pages long, with a dozen appendices and copious footnotes. But it would’ve been airtight. Ponytailed dreamers might feel that certain truths are “self-evident,” and the rabble might find such pithy phrasing inspirational, but nowadays we know better. The truth that hot coffee might burn you isn’t self evident, fergodsakes, so how can any reasonable person expect the so-called inalienable rights of man to slide by with a simple “because we say so?” The fact that the Declaration of Independence was issued with no caveats, waivers, or warning labels strikes the modern reader as not only silly but very, very irresponsible.

But they went ahead and did it anyway, didn’t they? And yeah, it turned out all right for that undeniably treasonous bunch and their fledgling nation. But do we really want to hold these loose cannons up as examples for our children? After all, they were rash, impolitic, conspiratorial, treasonous, and they spoke out against their leaders during wartime. These are the people we call patriots? Forgive me for saying so, but it sounds to me like they could’ve used a li’l dose of the Patriot Act.

It all worked out, of course, and we righted the good ship America along the way. Hundreds of years and thousands of laws later, we’ve filled in the blanks and covered our asses. It wasn’t easy, but we did it.

So have a very happy Independence Day, and make sure you raise a glass to the cooler, saner, more professional heads that took a messy, impractical, liberal idea and turned it into something that could actually make some money.