Summary of the project
The main aim of this project is to assess whether or not a property-owning democracy represents that which John Rawls called a realistic utopia (Rawls, 2001), this assesment being analysed through the theoretical lens of the predistribution versus predistribution debate (Hacker, 2011; O’Neill, 2020) as well as through several specific egalitarian public policies. The egalitarianism of the twenty-first century must certainly go beyond the paradigm of compensation but without falling into the false opposition between predistributive and redistributive policies and programs (Piketty, 2016).
Traditional redistributive policies - unemployment benefits, guaranteed minimum income benefits - are designed to help those who have suffered some misfortune, such as unemployment or an accident that prevents them from earning income on their own. However, in many cases, this public aid arrives too late. But that does not mean that we should abandon the strategy of redistribution. This means that we need to rethink and overhaul the welfare model of the welfare state, through the lens of the predistributive politics of a property-owning democracy.
However, it is essential that numerous clarifications be offered regarding the scope and objectives of the predistributive mechanisms, thereby helping to carry out both a diagnosis and proposing potential remedies to the social problems which have dominated public debate since the beginning of the financial and economic crisis of 2008. Exploring the predistributive politics of a property-owning democracy is a promissing means to help achieve these egalitarian objectives, thus contributing to a theory of a robust welfare state for the 21st century.
The tradition of asset-based egalitarianism, of which property-owning democracy forms one strand, argues that egalitarians made a mistake in focusing too narrowly on income inequality. Income inequality, measured by Gini coefficients and measures of GDP, fail to recognize the increasing share of capital compared to the share of labor in measurements of overall value and their relation to wellbeing. Capital concentration is increasing in affluent societies in the West. French economist Thomas Piketty (2020) has warned of the emergence of a class of patrimonial capitalists. Branko Milanovic (2016) has also coined the word homoploutia as the capital wealthy intersect with the income wealthy and largely inter-marry. Alan Krueger’s famous Great Gatsby Curve traces the recent decline of social mobility in the USA. This project thus examines whether, in these historical circumstances, egalitarians ought to focus on the ideal of a property-owning democracy. There are many varieties of the view, which taken together could compose an egalitarian tool-kit (White, 2015), each of them focusing on access to capital. We will assess the main policy prescriptions associated with it, which include a global wealth tax (Piketty, 2020); domestic wealth taxes (Thomas, 2017); special taxes on land (Kerr, 2016; Posner & Weyl, 2018); sovereign wealth funds (Cummine, 2016; Lansley, 2016); universal capital grants and stakeholder grants (Ackerman and Alstott, 1999); basic income (Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017); an extension to welfare state capitalism to include assets (O’Neill & Williamsom, 2012), corporatism (Hussain, 2012), and economic democracy in workplace democracy (Vrousalis, 2019) . Critics of the view, such as Gaus (2003) and Vallier (2019), argue that taxing wealth will prevent it performing its social and economic function of giving information about productive opportunities. We will confront socialist critics of the view, such as Edmundson (Edmundson, 2017; Merrill, 2019), according to which view property-owning democracy is fatally compromised via its concession that there can be private property rights in the major means of production.
Traditional redistributive policies - unemployment benefits, guaranteed minimum income benefits - are designed to help those who have suffered some misfortune, such as unemployment or an accident that prevents them from earning income on their own. However, in many cases, this public aid arrives too late. But that does not mean that we should abandon the strategy of redistribution. This means that we need to rethink and overhaul the welfare model of the welfare state, through the lens of the predistributive politics of a property-owning democracy.
However, it is essential that numerous clarifications be offered regarding the scope and objectives of the predistributive mechanisms, thereby helping to carry out both a diagnosis and proposing potential remedies to the social problems which have dominated public debate since the beginning of the financial and economic crisis of 2008. Exploring the predistributive politics of a property-owning democracy is a promissing means to help achieve these egalitarian objectives, thus contributing to a theory of a robust welfare state for the 21st century.
The tradition of asset-based egalitarianism, of which property-owning democracy forms one strand, argues that egalitarians made a mistake in focusing too narrowly on income inequality. Income inequality, measured by Gini coefficients and measures of GDP, fail to recognize the increasing share of capital compared to the share of labor in measurements of overall value and their relation to wellbeing. Capital concentration is increasing in affluent societies in the West. French economist Thomas Piketty (2020) has warned of the emergence of a class of patrimonial capitalists. Branko Milanovic (2016) has also coined the word homoploutia as the capital wealthy intersect with the income wealthy and largely inter-marry. Alan Krueger’s famous Great Gatsby Curve traces the recent decline of social mobility in the USA. This project thus examines whether, in these historical circumstances, egalitarians ought to focus on the ideal of a property-owning democracy. There are many varieties of the view, which taken together could compose an egalitarian tool-kit (White, 2015), each of them focusing on access to capital. We will assess the main policy prescriptions associated with it, which include a global wealth tax (Piketty, 2020); domestic wealth taxes (Thomas, 2017); special taxes on land (Kerr, 2016; Posner & Weyl, 2018); sovereign wealth funds (Cummine, 2016; Lansley, 2016); universal capital grants and stakeholder grants (Ackerman and Alstott, 1999); basic income (Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017); an extension to welfare state capitalism to include assets (O’Neill & Williamsom, 2012), corporatism (Hussain, 2012), and economic democracy in workplace democracy (Vrousalis, 2019) . Critics of the view, such as Gaus (2003) and Vallier (2019), argue that taxing wealth will prevent it performing its social and economic function of giving information about productive opportunities. We will confront socialist critics of the view, such as Edmundson (Edmundson, 2017; Merrill, 2019), according to which view property-owning democracy is fatally compromised via its concession that there can be private property rights in the major means of production.
