Harvard Law & Policy Review

The Smallholder Society

Articles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:59:00 -0500

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… more

The New Economic Insecurity -- And What Can Be Done About It

Articles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:56:00 -0500

Over the past generation, the economic risks American families face have increased substantially. Yet public programs have largely failed to adapt to these new and newly intensified risks, and private workplace benefits have eroded. As a result, Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if, as is ever more likely, they lose their footing. This tightrope both creates anxiety about the future and causes hardship when families do lose their balance. But importantly, it also threatens opportunity by making it more difficult for families to feel sufficiently secure to look confidently toward the future… more

Developmental Realism

Articles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:13:00 -0500

Sixteen years after the Cold War supposedly ended, its beginnings are big political business today. Both U.S. political parties are competing with each other for the mantle of Churchill and Truman. The Bush administration has pilfered from the neo-conservatives (and liberal hawks like Paul Berman) the propagandistic invocation of "Islamic totalitarianism" to draw parallels between its conduct of the "war on terror" and the previous experience of resistance to the ambitions of Hitler and Stalin. Democrat intellectuals housed at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) have even institutionalized the appeal to Truman’s image, in the form of the "Truman National Security… more