ABSTRACT
A property-owning democracy is a utopian proposal for a market society, containing the institution of private property, that guarantees to each citizen an allocation of capital as of right (Rawls, 2001; Freeman, 2013; Thomas, 2017). It is a form of pre-distributive egalitarianism where the emphasis is not on post-distributive redress to correct for unfair outcomes. Its aim, rather, is to identify that which Philippe Van Parijs calls an upstream “control variable” which determines that subsequent market outcomes are fair (Parijs, 1995, p.13). That control variable is an agent's initial endowment of capital where the words “initial” and “subsequent” are not to be given a limiting, temporal, interpretation (Thomas, 2020a). While it is true that some theorists in this tradition emphasise giving capital to citizens in the early stages of their lives, from baby bonds to demogrants in early adulthood, this policy question is separate from the abstract modelling of endowments that agents bring to the market prior to the determination of market outcomes. From Thomas Paine to Anne Alstot and Bruce Ackerman (and Thomas Piketty) the pre-distributive tradition is associated‚ rightly, with demogrants, but that is merely one policy from a range of policies that flow from the more basic idea of pre-distribution (Ackerman and Alstot, 1999; Piketty, 2020; Paine, 1797/2000). This limited interpretation of the idea has not helped in the attempt to spell out its distinctiveness as an alternative to familiar redistributive egalitarianism (Thomas, 2020a). At the level of policy, the property-owning democrat hands over to the discipline of macro-economics the empirical question of which policy solutions maximise the ratio of productive to unproductive uses of capital. However, the tradition has developed a range of core proposals, notably targeting inheritance via estate taxes, as a form of gift-giving that concentrates capital produced productively in the past in the hands of the non-productive. Piketty has suggested an on-going wealth tax on assets, although partly for reasons of transparency to encourage fuller disclosure about the forms in which wealth is held (Piketty, 2014). These policies might usefully be traded off against each other; if a person has been subject to on-going taxation of assets throughout their lifetime, then the taxation of inheritance may prove unnecessary.
