Ownership policy

[rogerashton]

Ownership policy is a set of public policies designed to encourage (or perhaps discourage) wide ownership of particular kinds of assets.

The Washington Shrubbery* likes to talk about an "ownership society" and how people should own this or that -- which suggests that ownership policy is central to their platform. But to a considerable extent the effects of the administration have been the opposite.

Should a democratic republic have an ownership policy? Free market conservatives would say no -- that what assets people own should be their own business. The Economist magazine, free-marketeering since the 1840's, has criticized policies that encourage people to own homes on the ground that it distorts the economy, dilutes incentives to build rental property, and contributes to suburban sprawl and congestion. Socialists would probably also say no, reasoning that society should not be based on ownership but on our common humanity. Ownership policy tends to go along with populism, though.

The US has had an ownership policy since Jefferson and the Northwest Territories Act. The main purpose of that ownership policy was to encourage wide ownership of farms, as Jeffersonians identified "the people" as farmers. A vestige of this survives in our farm policy, which subsidizes farmers on the theory that this will slow the discontinuation of family farms and preserve farming "as a way of life." (In my opinion the failure of this policy to stop the decline of farming in the 20th century demonstrates that its time is long past. The People are no longer a mass of yeoman farmers.) Since the Roosevelt administration, a major aim of US ownership policy has been to encourage ownership of houses.

Some sociologists (sorry, don't have any links or refs right now) have advocated an ownership policy that encourages poor people to own financial assets, as a social mobility measure. Traces of that can be seen in the rhetoric of the shrubbery*. However, taken as a whole, this is hardly a right-wing objective.

Should we, then, have a policy that encourages people to own financial assets for retirement and other purposes? Perhaps we should, and it is in that spirit that my proposal for personal accumulation accounts was made. But this <b>is not a substitute for insurance against poverty in old age,</b> which is the purpose of social security, and the reason the shrubbery* want to confute the two is that they want to create cover for their real objective of abolishing social security and giving the money to the billionaire class.

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/personal/DUthing.html

A more radical ownership policy would be to encourage people to own the companies that employ them. We made some progress in that direction with the ESOP law passed through the leadership of Louisiana populist Russell Long. Share the wealth! Indeed this is an ownership policy some socialists might want to endorse.

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/personal/cs/coopsocialism.html

In any case, careful thinking about ownership policy is an enemy of the right and especially of our acephalous administration. Perhaps the Democratic Party ought to have a statement on ownership policy.