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It was their courage that led eight years later to the British surrender at Yorktown and our freedom. Today, as was true then, the American people are more powerful than big government and more powerful than big media. Our belief in the freedom of ideas, and the rights of individuals, which come from God and are loaned to government, is both an opportunity, to live free, and a responsibility to be eternally vigilant and remind government and institutions who holds the rights in our country.

Given the complexity of life, the narrow range of understanding possessed by any particular group is guaranteed to fall short at some point. Given the concentration of power exercised under a centralized system, the failures are guaranteed to have widespread and crippling effects. By contrast, the multiplicity of successes and failures over a wide range of scale that appear so chaotic in a state of liberty have the benefit of limiting the damage and of spreading throughout society successes which can be emulated and modified to fit local conditions.

Among some, the attitude seems to be “We know so much now, but people don’t care or won’t listen or aren’t changing fast enough. What can we do to change things now?" The yearning appears to be for some universal remedy. This may be “nice”, but is hardly practicable, let alone even conceivable. It would require an understanding of life and society beyond the capability of any individual or group. Universalist approaches in the realm of economics and government have proved uniformly disastrous.

The level of British government interference in the everyday life of the colonies is like nothing at all compared to what we suffer on all levels today, and yet the founders were willing to fight and die to end it.

Yours is a brilliant post. It illuminates the problem of centralized decision making in complex societies and the inevitable unexpected consequences. See any list of characteristics of dynamic complex systems and you will find unexpected consequences prominent in the list. See any textbook concerning organizational theory and design to get a sense of what the consequences of centralized decision making can be when the organization (nation) is complex and the problems are unpredictable and rapidly evolving.