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Thursday, December 02, 2004
  The Ownership Society - Part I

I am fond of exploring obvious, but overlooked, implications of big ideas that are simply stated. Let's talk about the Ownership Society.

There was a time when the political franchise was limited to property owners (free, male property owners, that is).

One effect of converting the US to an ownership society is to turn back the clock. When more of the electorate own homes, businesses, stocks, etc., it means that the franchise is more nearly like it used to be. Though property ownership is no longer a pre-condition of the political franchise, the effect of successful prosecution of the ownership society policy will once again make property ownership and the franchise co-conditions.

The reason, of course, that it is desirable to identify the franchise with property ownership is the salubrious negative feedback effect. When property owners vote for taxes, they vote to tax themselves. When those without property vote for taxes, they vote to tax someone else. Hence the bread and circuses cautionary example of the Roman Empire. It is important that people vote on how they will pay the bills - not on how the government will dispense largesse to the voters.

President Bush's promotion of the Ownership Society could achieve a profoundly conservative objective by broadening the property-owner class rather than restricting the voting class. It is the kind of solution that I like - turning voters into stakeholders by expanding the class of stakeholders to include everyone with a job.

Of course, that is already the case. It's just that very few people understand that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is nothing more than an IOU that is redeemed month after month by drawing on the total revenues received by the federal government. Not a Ponzi scheme exactly, but an inter-generational compact imposed by the recipients without the consent of the payors.

The effect (if not the goal) of the partial privatization of Social Security portion of the Ownership Society initiative is to focus our collective attention on the financial reality of guaranteeing retirement incomes in an aging polity. It does not "solve" the Social Security problem, but it should put us in a more sober state of mind to attack the problem.



 

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