The Smallholder Society

by Michael Lind

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.1 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 Act2 in the nineteenth century to the federal home mortgage interest deduction in the twentieth.

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