Black and white mezzotint on paper of man in spectacles and fur hat holding a book in his left hand. His right hand gestures to a quill and piece of paper on the desk in front of him

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1777) | Johann Martin Will, copy after Charles Nicholas Cochin / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / CC0

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the delegates had created. His reply—“A republic, if you can keep it”—was no mere quip from an aging sage. It was a warning that republics are fragile, rare, and never self-sustaining.

What Franklin implied was that the durability of a republic demands not only civic virtue but also economic discipline. From the beginning, the American experiment rested on a precarious balance between freedom and responsibility, between opportunity and prudence, as well as between ambition and obligation. That balance has been tested ever since. And it remains our central challenge today.

The economic roots of the Constitution

The American Revolution’s end, in 1783, left the young nation insolvent and unstable. Soldiers were unpaid for their service, farmers were sinking into debt, and states erected trade barriers against one another. Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts revealed how quickly despair could turn into revolt. The Articles of Confederation were powerless to stabilize the economy—or the union.

In 1787, in Philadelphia, , the framers responded not only as philosophers of liberty but also as pragmatists. The Constitution remedied economic disorder by granting Congress the power to tax, regulate commerce, and assume state debts. These provisions restored credit and trust at home and abroad.

It is no accident that the Constitution has endured for more than two centuries. It succeeded not only because of its declared ideals but also because it resolved urgent crises of debt and disorder. 

The Constitution as a living document or as a fixed original

Here is how the Constitution resolved such crises. The framers, knowing they were not omniscient, built into the document an amendment process. By requiring both broad national consensus (two-thirds of Congress) and deep state-level assent (three-quarters of the states), they made change possible but without making it easy.

This process reflects a profound paradox: The Constitution must be firm enough to stabilize a republic but flexible enough for its survival. Moreover, each generation has wrestled with whether to treat the Constitution as a “living document,” evolving alongside civic and economic needs, or as a fixed charter bounded by “originalism”.

Amendments themselves reflect this tension. Some—like the Bill of Rights that guard against overreach by enshrining liberties—the framers deemed timeless. Others—like the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, the income tax by the Sixteenth, or women’s suffrage by the Nineteenth—were corrections, expanding democracy or updating the balance of civic and economic responsibility. Every amendment testifies to Franklin’s point: “Keeping” the republic requires not passive reverence but active renewal.

The revolution of bread and butter

The American Revolution itself was driven as much by material concerns as by high ideals. Colonists resisted taxes and trade monopolies because they threatened their livelihoods. Washington’s greatest challenge was not the battlefield at Yorktown but the daily struggle to clothe, arm, and feed his ragged troops. For Thomas Paine and Jefferson, republicanism was meaningless if common people struggled under perpetual debt while elites prospered.

The framers therefore placed the power of taxation and commerce in Congress, where it is closest to the people. Hamilton’s bank and Jefferson’s vision of widespread opportunity differed, but both believed that economic security was essential to civic stability.

Inequality as a peril

Economic exclusion, then as now, weakens the republic. In the early going, suffrage often depended on property. Today, rising inequality and concentrated wealth threaten to corrode civic trust. When ordinary citizens feel locked out, when prosperity is hoarded by the few, ballots lose meaning. And democracy is hollowed out.

Rome collapsed not because it was invaded but because its broad middle class lost prosperity and power to concentrated patrician wealth. Our republic faces no less a danger.

Civic duty, fiscal prudence

Franklin’s warning was more than just about tyranny; it was also about insolvency. As a republic cannot live on corruption and debt, it also cannot thrive if citizens withdraw from civic life. Budgets, taxation, and fiscal choices are not abstractions. They determine whether citizens trust their institutions, whether opportunity appears open or closed, and whether liberty is tangible.

Here the constitutional debate between originalism and the living document reemerges. One vision holds that fiscal discipline and civic liberty are best preserved by sticking to the framers’ narrow meanings. The other insists that to “keep” the republic means adapting constitutional principles to new crises—economic globalization, skyrocketing inequality, digital commerce, and a runaway national debt. These interpretive battles are not academic—they shape who participates in prosperity and in the political process.

Can we still keep it?

The framers did not hand us a finished republic to live by. They handed us a scaffolding. Civil war, emancipation, suffrage expansions, industrialization, and globalization have all tested the republic. Fortunately, each era amended the “blueprint” in ways both legal and practical—rebalancing liberty, justice, and economic necessity.

The questions today echo the founding. Can our institutions bridge divisions of class, race, and ideology? Can we share prosperity broadly enough to maintain legitimacy? And can we govern inclusively in the face of inequality?

The republic is not guaranteed. It must be earned through civic participation, prudent stewardship, and the willingness to adapt. The original meaning of the Constitution gave us roots; its amendment process gives us growth. A republic survives only with stability and flexibility, with liberty and responsibility, as well as with fiscal prudence and civic justice.

A republic, yes. But only if we can keep it—only if we can still afford it.

Larry Schwartz
Larry Schwartz

Retired economist for the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Commerce

120 thoughts on “A Republic, If We Can Afford It”

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