The Smallholder Society

In recent years, the idea of promoting widespread property ownership in the United States by means of public policy has enjoyed a renaissance across the political spectrum. George W. Bush and other American conservatives have borrowed the term "ownership society" from Margaret Thatcher's Britain and employed it to justify a range of proposals from the partial privatization of Social Security to individual health savings accounts. On the left, thinkers like Michael Sherraden and Bruce Ackerman, reviving a tradition that goes back to Thomas Paine, have proposed granting every citizen a substantial capital endowment. More modest versions of this proposal have been enacted in Britain, in the form of "child trust funds," and introduced as legislation in the U.S. Congress. Promoters present policies to increase savings, such as tax-favored individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and individual development accounts (IDAs), as methods of raising the U.S. savings rate, or decreasing the gap in asset ownership between white and non-white Americans. Whether these proposals emanate from the Right, Left, or Center, they are often justified by invoking historic U.S. policies to promote property ownership, from the Homestead Act in the nineteenth century to federal home mortgage interest deduction in the twentieth.

Progressives should welcome the new interest in using public policy to promote widespread asset ownership. But there is a danger that this focus on incremental improvement will sap the potential for a major rethinking of U.S. policy. In particular, there is a growing danger that the litany of public policies to promote private asset ownership will be invoke opportunistically to provide a new and trendy argument for familiar conservative and liberal policy proposals. Conservatives and libertarians already employ the rhetoric of the "ownership society" to justify tax cuts and other measures that they formerly justified on the basis of other arguments. In response, a growing number of progressives are jumping on the ownership society bandwagon, redefining "ownership" to include concepts remote from ordinary notions of individual property, such as social insurance entitlements and public education...

For the full text of this article, please download the PDF version below. Lind's piece is part of of a collection of essays on the topic of increasing Americans' economic opportunity and security that appeared in this issue of the Harvard Law and Policy Review. An article by Senior Fellow Jacob S. Hacker is also part of that collection.