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Near the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin did something unusual for a founding father. He set up a loan fund. Franklin spent his early years in his brother’s print shop, working for someone else’s profit. He knew the difference between earning a wage and owning the thing that pays it, including that the gap is rarely about talent. It is about capital. A worker without a loan sells his labor and gets by. Give that same worker enough to buy tools or a stake in a business, and you change his family’s path for generations. Franklin knew this firsthand: a loan from two friends had enabled him to start the printing business that allowed him to make his fortune.
On June 23, 1789, less than a year before his death, Franklin signed a codicil to his will. In it were provisions for revolving funds in Boston and Philadelphia, loans to young tradespeople at five percent annual interest, with every repayment financing the next borrower. The funds were disbursed for two centuries as Franklin stipulated. By the time it closed in 1990, hundreds of workers had become small business owners and the two cities had banked millions for public use.
Franklin had no name for what he was doing. We do. It is called impact investing, and Franklin was practicing it when the United States was just being born.
Fair access to capital is neither a progressive cause nor a conservative one. Instead, it is the founding American idea. Yet to our nation’s detriment, awareness of our impact investing tradition is overlooked and underappreciated.
For most of our history, it was part of the country’s operating system. When private capital would not flow where the nation needed it, Americans built the on-ramps by hand. The thirty-year fixed mortgage, a deliberate invention of the 1940s, has carried more than 60 percent of families into homeownership. The Farm Credit System, the GI Bill, the Small Business Administration and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit functioned similarly. None were handouts. Each made it rational for private capital to reach places it had skipped. They worked because they assumed the economic pie could grow.
Then we let a darker story take over, one that centered on an old belief that your gain must be my loss. Colonizers ran empires on it, and researchers trace it partly to the experience of chattel enslavement, so the country’s original sin and its economic blind spot share a root. Franklin embodied that contradiction himself. He enslaved human beings before becoming an abolitionist, and the country he helped found rationed its promise of opportunity from the beginning.
What changed in the late twentieth century was not the instinct but its organization. In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell, soon bound for the Supreme Court, urged American business to mobilize and defend itself. He marked the moment this fixed-pie story hardened into doctrine, helped by a misreading of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, two men wiser than the followers who quoted them. According to Powell, your gain was my loss, and capital’s job was to extract value, not to widen who gets to create it.
The hostility among socioeconomic classes that Powell’s instructional memo instilled in our economy generated workplace polarization between management and labor, with expensive consequences. Gallup research indicates that disengaged workers cost American businesses up to $600 billion dollars per year, money lost because we have been convinced to see others as rivals instead of partners. We have been encouraged to be combatively competitive with our friends and neighbors, so that in order for me to win, you have to lose. Psychologists call that “collective illusion.” The messaging strategy to accomplish it is called propaganda.
Very few people want a world of constant battle with everyone all the time. It’s both unnecessary and exhausting.
The research on this topic is interesting and revealing. In Populace’s 2025 Private Opinion in America study, 35 percent of Americans publicly expressed the belief that we live in a mostly fair society, while only 11 percent actually believed it in private. Nearly two-thirds of Americans stay quiet on what matters most, certain we stand alone, and in that silence, the illusion of conflict becomes self-fulfilling.
That illusion is breaking in real places with real names. In El Paso, workers at a landscaping company took out a loan and bought the business from their retiring owner, and now own what they used to clock into. Outside Detroit, first-time buyers reach homeownership through a fund built with local government and donors. In rural North Carolina, one town now has broadband service cheaper than the dial-up it replaced. They are investing in America, expanding access to fair financing so they can turn hard work and opportunity into progress for their families, communities, and our country. The investors behind deals like these do not share a party: an Army veteran and an AME minister, tribal leaders and Goldman alumni, a conservation group working with a global bank.
This is what makes the work patriotic rather than partisan. It is neither charity nor redistribution. It is the same wager Franklin made: that a worker with a loan builds security for a family and growth for a country at once. Positive sum economics in motion. The biggest investors following that logic are already feeling the math: a pension or sovereign fund that owns a slice of nearly everything pays for exclusion twice, in the deal it skips and in the social cost that lands back on its books.
As the country turns 250 this year, the tools that built it are still in our hands. Loan guarantees, tax credits, patient capital and public pensions are idling on the sidelines. You do not need to be wealthy to join. It can look like moving part of your savings to a community bank or asking your advisor why your portfolio is not working harder. The barrier was never money, but the story we told ourselves about it.
Franklin’s blueprint had a quiet birthday this June, turning 237 with no parade and no cake.
The ask is simple. Stop performing a disagreement we do not actually have. Pick up the idea Franklin handed down and put it back to work. He bet that a worker with a loan could build a family’s fortune and a country’s future at once, and he was right for two hundred years. He still is. We all win when we all win.
Antony Bugg-Levine was central to coining and popularizing the term “impact investing.” Roy Swan runs it at scale, as director of mission investments at the Ford Foundation. Roy’s book, Positive Sum: How Zero-Sum Thinking Broke Capitalism – and How We Can Fix It, and Antony’s book, Investing in America, will both be published on July 21 by Wiley.
