Early on, the colonies provided a level of economic equality that simply wasn’t possible in Europe. For one thing, there was a lot of land available once the colonists started taking it from Native Americans, and—as the game Monopoly shows us—owning property has historically been a good way to get ahead. Colonists were able to profit from the land. They farmed wheat, tobacco, and rice, and fished the seas for cod and hunted whales. With easy access to abundant resources, they sent goods to Europe and profited as a result. At the same time, population growth was slow. That meant those who wanted to work but didn’t own land could always find a job, And those who owned land paid a premium for labor because—with the exception of the South, which had slave labor—those seeking workers had few candidates to choose from. The scarcity of labor created an unintentional redistribution of wealth—inflating the earnings of non-landowners.

Upward mobility was also a lot easier to achieve around the time of the country’s founding, according to Gordon S. Wood, the author of the seminal book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. There were poor people in the early colonies and the Republic, but many fewer than there had been in Europe. About half the population of Britain in the 18th century was on the dole, Wood said. But there were far fewer poor people in America, partly because they couldn’t get there if they were truly impoverished.

This equality left the founders focused on one thing: freedom from aristocratic England and its laws, which allowed for rampant inequality. Hobble the aristocrats and the people keeping others down, the thinking went, and anyone, no matter how humble their birth, could succeed.

For example, after the revolution, John Adams advocated for laws that forced families to divide their estates among all their children, to prevent European-style feudal estates, according to Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B.Freeman, and Douglas L. Kruse in The Citizen’s Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century. The goal of a republic, he believed, was “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

When, in 1786, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania debated giving a corporate charter to the Bank of America, a handful of representatives expressed concern that the bank would give too much economic power to one set of men, according to The Citizen’s Share.

“Shall we grant such an institution? Shall we give such an artificial spring to concentrated wealthy? By no means,” Representative William Findley said to the General Assembly of Philadelphia. The assembly then voted to deny the bank the charter—though later bank directors were able to drum up support by convincing Thomas Paine to lobby for a new assembly.

The founders also favored workers over owners, which helped kept a class of non-owners remain economically empowered. According to The Citizen’s Share, after the cod stock was decimated by the Revolution, Jefferson proposed a tax credit for cod vessels to help jumpstart the industry. He wasn’t sure, though, whether the credit should go to the owners of the vessels, or to the crew of the vessels, who were also suffering financially. In 1792, Congress passed a law mandating that five-eighths of the credit go to the crew, and three-eighths go to the owners. Those who controlled the means of production were regulated, then, from taking too big a share.“The leaders of the new Republic were not swayed by the cod fishery’s owners and financiers, who no doubt had the eighteenth century equivalent of K Street lobbyists pressing their cause,” the authors of The Citizen’s Share write.