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In America, one broken-down car can cost someone a job. One medical bill can wipe out a bank account. One missed paycheck can push a family from stability to desperation.

That is not freedom in any real sense.

As the nation marks 250 years of independence, we should say plainly what too many families already know: Freedom requires economic security. And economic security is only achievable when people have resources that exceed the basic cost of living, allowing them to cover their daily needs and build essential wealth — the savings, assets, and financial cushion needed to withstand life’s inevitable shocks.

Pathway to opportunity

Two hundred and fifty years ago, our Founding Fathers made a promise that people would have a right to self-determination. It was a promise that hard work, responsibility, and perseverance would open real pathways to opportunity. As we mark this anniversary, we must ask an honest question: For how many Americans does that promise hold?

For too many, it does not. Millions of families are working, paying their bills, and doing everything right, yet have almost nothing set aside for the moment life goes wrong. A child spikes a fever. A parent grows too frail to climb the stairs alone. The cost of in-home care lands like a bombshell. One emergency room visit, one layoff, one transmission repair, and stability collapses into crisis. Their rights exist in theory, but their actual circumstances leave people with fewer choices, fewer chances, and far less control over their own lives.

The Constitution guarantees liberty, but circumstances can constrain it. People without the resources to withstand hardship face insurmountable barriers to education, purchasing homes, launching businesses, or saving for retirement. They cannot give their children a running start. They may have rights on paper, but lack the economic security to fully exercise them.

The founders understood at least this much: Liberty could not survive as an abstraction. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document that helped supply the moral language of the Declaration of Independence, described the inherent rights of the people as including life and liberty, but also “the means of acquiring and possessing property” and pursuing happiness and safety. That phrase matters.

Today, we understand “the means” less as land than as essential wealth. This is not wealth in the sense of luxury, privilege, or vast accumulation. It is the modest but vital foundation that allows a family to absorb a shock without being knocked flat. It is the money to repair the car that gets someone to work, cover the childcare that keeps a parent employed, pay for medicine before a condition becomes a crisis, or help an aging parent remain safe at home.

Essential wealth is what allows families to plan instead of merely react. It is the difference between recovering from a setback and being defined by it.

For generations, the government has measured economic well-being almost entirely by the absence of poverty. It tracks what people earn while paying little attention to what they own, save, or can lean on when hardship strikes. Income matters, but it cannot tell us whether a family is truly economically secure.

Wealth, not income

The real test comes when life happens. And in those moments, the difference between stability and crisis is not income. It is wealth, or the lack of it.

The cost of ignoring this is written across the country and across Pennsylvania. Tens of millions of American households cannot cover a modest emergency expense, including 48% of households here in the commonwealth, according to the “Measuring the True Cost of Economic Security” report. Wealth gaps yawn across race, geography, and generation, falling hardest on communities long denied the chance to build.

As we celebrate 250 years of American independence, we must think bigger.

We need policies that help families build assets, not just scrape by. Policies that expand pathways to homeownership, invest in children’s futures, widen access to savings and wealth-building, and tear down the barriers that block economic mobility. We need to ensure every child, no matter their zip code or their parents’ income, has the tools to build a secure future.

We must stop managing poverty and start measuring the true cost of living, which includes investing in freedom. Two and a half centuries in, the promise of America was never that people would simply get by. It was that they would have the freedom to get ahead. Living up to it now is the work this anniversary demands.

Michael A. Nutter served as the 98th mayor of Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016 and is currently a senior executive fellow at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Jennifer Jones Austin is the CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies and cochair of the National True Cost of Living Coalition.

When the people drafting the U.S. founding documents got to work in the mid-1700s, they made unprecedented progress on the ills plaguing the preceding era, while failing to meet the fullest expression of their ideals. They would leave those moral aspirations to us — their inheritors.

Their impact is all around us. When any person, anywhere in the world, claims, “I have rights,” they are nodding toward the Enlightenment ideals at the heart of the U.S. founding. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the extent to which those founding principles were revolutionary for simply quelling religious violence.

In the era preceding the founding, millions of Europeans died in warfare couched within differences of faith. On this side of the Atlantic, institutions reflected the certainty of one, true God. Harvard was founded in 1636 to train Puritan clergymen; William and Mary was established six decades later to train Anglican clergy. In the colony of Maryland, Catholics battled Protestants in 1655, leading to the execution of four Catholic leaders.

In this context, 11 years before he would take control of Pennsylvania, William Penn wrote a treatise establishing a rationale for religious toleration. Benjamin Franklin picked up that emphasis when he shared Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania in 1739. In the document that framed the University of Pennsylvania’s early years, Franklin insisted that students would consider “the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government.”

Penn’s early, religiously inclusive orientation was at odds with the identity politics of the era, which featured an association between Anglicanism and British loyalty. As tensions grew, the university trustees mandated an Anglican majority on the board, contributing to suspicions of loyalist bias.

After the British occupation of Philadelphia and 2,000 disease-driven deaths among the Continental Army at Valley Forge, state leaders dissolved the university. According to the Pennsylvania Assembly, “the College had been ‘in the hands of dangerous and disaffected men’ who have provoked ‘tumult, sedition, and bloodshed.’”

A new university was mandated — and the leadership was diverse across Protestant sects, including even Catholic representation. The leaders, however, were uniform in their support for the American revolutionaries.

This creation of, and commitment to, a civic, secular, tolerant institution of higher learning reflected centuries of conflict in arms, persuasion in conversation, and development of ideals. And, like the Declaration of Independence, it was so near in time and space that Penn’s founding was not a crowning achievement but a milestone on a much longer journey.

Indeed, America’s hypocrisies at the founding and struggles since that time are understood in terms of American ideals: enacting in life and in law, through shared governance, a country that embraces the dignity of all people.

A century after William Penn died, Frederick Douglass was born into enslavement — yet he was destined to advance America’s moral imagination.

Douglass self-emancipated by escaping to Philadelphia at the age of 20 in 1838. Only three years later, he rose to fame through his abolitionist speeches, compelling audiences with his message and oratory power.

He also grew through international collaboration. His 1840s tour of Ireland and Britain revealed the interdependence of global struggles for freedom.

When Douglass returned to the states in 1847, he joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Philadelphian Lucretia Mott in upstate New York at the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. As his reputation grew, he occasionally parted ways with his mentor, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

One critical difference featured a perennial question: Is it possible to reform the system?

Garrison and many of his followers viewed the U.S. Constitution as a pro-slavery document. He refused to participate in U.S. electoral politics and believed free states should separate from states that permitted slavery. Douglass differed.

The debate extended across the Atlantic. In 1860, Douglass was invited to Glasgow, Scotland, to defend his position. He began by clarifying that “the American government and the American constitution … are as distinct from each other as the compass is from the ship.”

In an extensively argued defense of constitutional principles, textual, and moral clarity, Douglass asserted that if Americans honor the Constitution, “we will have no need of a dissolution of the Union — we will have a dissolution of slavery all over that country.”

In this orientation toward America, emerging ever more aligned with its fullest expression as a birthplace of freedom, Douglass echoed Franklin.

At the age of 81, in 1787, Franklin urged adoption of the U.S. Constitution — specifically recognizing it had faults he disagreed with. He emphasized union over disunion; he offered faith in the possibility of stepping from the rule of a king to the rule of the people, however small that first step was — it was still a spark.

Though Douglass would live most of his life in Massachusetts, New York, and the nation’s capital, he gained his freedom by coming to Philadelphia — a city and region awash in abolitionist organizing. Harriet Tubman also established her freedom in Philadelphia before moving northward. In the same era, the nation’s first historically Black colleges and universities, Lincoln and Cheyney, were founded in Southeast Pennsylvania. They would soon educate numerous pivotal civil rights leaders in the U.S., as well as the young men who would later become the first presidents of Ghana and Nigeria.

Revolutions in human freedom move much more like a river than a straight line. We who work, vote, and struggle for freedom are the water. We hit rocks, cliffs, and eddies — but freedom, like water, finds its path.

That freedom-finding is not merely metaphorical. In the 1700s and early 1800s, enslaved Africans fleeing Georgia fled not north but south, where the Spanish ruled until 1821. Just a bit north of St. Augustine, Fla., is Fort Mose, established as a legally sanctioned free Black community in 1738.

Freedom can be enacted on any soil, by any heritage. And it has been violated — all around the world — by a full range of traditions. Legally sanctioned slavery continued in Brazil through the end of the 1800s; it persisted in the Indian Ocean region well into the 1900s. Religious freedom — and freedom of conscience — remains an ideal that has yet to be fully enacted.

In the U.S., it is better than it is in much of the world, but we, like people anywhere, will always need to challenge ourselves to fully understand and enact our highest ideals.

When we celebrate the founding, we celebrate ideals. When we make American progress, we advance their implementation. The rights underlying democracy are not a given; they are the product of a cocreated moral imagination, grounded in shared values, extended through quality schooling, and in need of restrengthening and improving with every generation.

Eric Hartman recently delivered invited lectures on these topics at Northeastern University and at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla. This op-ed is excerpted from a longer article currently under review.