The ownership society. The phrase has a nice ring to it, even if you aren’t the sort of committed conservative who wishes death and defunding upon every remnant of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The rhetoric that surrounds President Bush’s notion of the ownership society inevitably hearkens back to deeply rooted American ideals of liberty, independence and self-reliance.
For Daily columnist John Stiglich (The ownership society, 03/21/2007) and many other conservatives, those three words seem to be the greatest thing to come along in American political life since that special morning when the Great Communicator single-handedly dismantled the Evil Empire by telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down some wall.
A closer look at Bush’s ownership society, though, reveals that its policies would do much for those who already have much – and do little for those who already have little. This isn’t an accident; it’s the very design of a proposal driven by a free-market ideology deeply hostile to the egalitarian policies that have given fair opportunities to tens of millions of Americans.
Take, for example, the idea of health savings accounts. Those struggling to get by aren’t likely to have much money left over at the end of the month to throw into a nifty health savings account. But for those with the right combination of health and affluence, health savings accounts are a nice tax dodge.
Privatizing Social Security is another core policy in the ownership society. Bush’s failure to sell the idea to a skeptical nation hasn’t discouraged true believers. Stiglich got so excited about privatization that he even said funds for Social Security will dry up in 2019. That’s not, well, true. Even without reform, the Social Security trust fund should let the system pay its bills until 2042 or so. With enough ideology, who needs research?
Traditional motifs of American discourse like free-market ideology are the most important components of the ownership society. Crucially, one of those tropes is, late 19th-century, up-by-the-bootstraps social Darwinism.
In the ownership society, government isn’t supposed to do much of anything, and workers aren’t supposed to organize to demand a fair deal through collective bargaining. Once we’re truly living in the ownership society, anyone who isn’t doing well economically should simply be seen as having foolishly mismanaged assets.
When 100 percent of the blame for poverty lands squarely on the poor, there’s no conceivable moral justification for any silly bleeding-heart redistribution of wealth. Even today, you can’t vocally advocate redistribution of wealth, but it sneaks by here and there through things like subsidized student loans, food stamps and Medicaid. In the ownership society, though, there will be no need for an equitable distribution of wealth, or opportunity. The free market will allocate capital and assign prices (for education and health care, for example) as the invisible hand deems fit. And that’s that.
Economic growth under such a scenario won’t be as great as ownership society advocates hope. As bright young people find a college education utterly beyond their means and resign themselves to menial labor, our nation will inexorably lose its competitive edge in a technology-oriented world economy. The wealthy elites who benefit most from ownership-society policies might find themselves frittering away their capital on security systems, should a particular pastime popular in other countries with grossly unjust distributions of wealth – kidnapping for ransom – emerge as an American phenomenon. And once health care is carefully rationed solely on the basis of ability to pay, workforce productivity will suffer somewhat due to the probable increase in mortality rate.
Personally, I prefer to live in a country where people realize that society functions better, morally as well as economically, with the occasional deviations from laissez faire dogma that are necessary to ensure the existence of a strong middle class and something resembling equality of opportunity. If Stiglich thinks that makes me a Socialist, then so be it.
Christopher Zbrozek is an LSA senior and a member of the Daily’s editorial board.