Today is forecast to be a firecracker Fourth of July — that is, a very hot one. Here’s hoping yours is a very good one, too.

We celebrate July 4 because, of course, it’s our Independence Day — the first major step in the founding of our democracy. The brave Americans who declared our independence on this day in 1776 set in motion the creation of a unique social experiment.

The 56 men who signed that declaration were courageous beyond belief. English King George III could be merciless. Failure of the American revolution would have meant the signers had put their names on their own death warrants.

A self-governing democracy on such a grand scale had never been tried before. There were very real questions about whether the effort would succeed or fail. Even now, 245 years later, not all those questions have been answered.

Not all citizens could vote when our country was formed, nor were all citizens represented. To an unfortunate extent those are still true.

How and when we should make treaties or wage war was a question for our Founding Fathers. That issue is much more significant today.

Our founders, though, seem from this distant future to have been incredibly shrewd.

What they got totally right is people are human and therefore flawed. Perhaps the founders had learned that from their very recent history.

The Continental Congress, our first government, struggled to administer the war to free us from England. The Congress of the Confederation it created, once England sued for peace, was weak and ineffective.

It wasn’t until our Constitution was written and ratified by the 13 original states that we had a uniform system of courts, finance and trade. With independent legislative, executive and judicial branches we finally had a relatively consistent, stable government.

The tension between the branches of our government is something we really should celebrate more than we do. If one gathers together enough people, some of them will turn out to be liars or cheats or scoundrels — or possibly all three.

There are about 335 million people in America. Approximately 168 million are considered to be in the workforce. Right now, about 24 million people — one in every seven Americans in the workforce — has a job with the government or the military, at some level.

Government’s job is to keep the liars, cheats and scoundrels among us, including in government, in line. Government must do that while doing those things for all the people that the people cannot do for themselves as they go through their lives seeking to be well, content and happy.

Yes, that’s painting government into existence with a very broad brush. That’s why we have elected representatives.

Their jobs, at all their many levels, are essentially the same. With input from the people they decide what government should do.

Elected representatives (politicians) are fairly good at creating government. They’re often not as good at deciding when they, or those they put to work supposedly on our behalf, are actually doing work of any value.

This weakness is compounded by the human tendency for some of them to be liars, cheats or scoundrels. Having one, and sometimes two, independent branches of government acting as checks on our representatives, and they on the other branches, is more than a good idea.

It’s positively brilliant. While we’ve had our share of stumbles, we’re almost two and a half centuries into this experiment in democracy with pretty fair results.

So happy firecracker Fourth of July!

Meanwhile, our Congress is taking another holiday. They won’t be back at work in Washington, D.C., until July 12.

Dave Finkelnburg is a long-time Idahoan, a former newspaper journalist, and is currently semi-retired from an engineering career.