Our Founding Fathers are still with us. The story of America that they started in 1776 is only just beginningâand they will be with us all the way.
Thats because their legacy lives on not just in our laws, our Constitution and their fundamental proposition that all men are created equal with the same unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happinessârights that are God-given, not government-given.
Their legacy also lives on in the spirit with which they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. That spirit animated our Founders bold vision of the future; their drive to take decisive action to make that vision happen; and their willingness to risk it all, including “their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor,” to accomplish their goal. It didnt die with the revolutionary generation.
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It lives on in what we can call founders fire. That same combination of bold vision, relentless drive and the willingness to see risk as opportunity is baked into our American culture. Its the core of what is called American exceptionalism.
Because no other country or society has embraced that founders fire to the same extent or made it part of the original creation of a nation and a people.
In fact, it predates our founding. It grew up with the very first settlers on this continent, with their “errand into the wilderness” to create a new church under God, a new society and a new life for themselves, by taking on the risks and challenges of an unknown land in order to build what John Winthrop and then Ronald Reagan called a shining city upon a hill.
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That founders spirit grew and thrived along the American frontier, turning a vast continent into a land of opportunity for all, an “empire of liberty” in Thomas Jeffersons phrase.
It was fundamental to how the Founding Fathers in 1776 were able to seize the moment to create a new nation. It also lives on with the two great gifts the original Founders left for the nation they createdâand for the founders of American businesses, enterprises and institutions that followed.
The first is embedded in the Constitution itself, in Article 1, Section 8: the right to own intellectual property and to acquire government-licensed patents to protect that right. Since George Washington signed the Patent Act in 1790, and for more than 200 years, that right has unleashed what Abraham Lincoln â who was himself a patent holder â called the “fire of genius” to grow and sustain the freest and richest economy on earth, from Samuel Morses telegraph and Edisons light bulb to Henry Fords automobile and Steve Jobs personal computer, right down to todays AI companies and the builders of tomorrows quantum computers.
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The second gift is contained in the Declarations commitment to
