Sage insights about the “ownership society” and how it relates to the financial crisis
I’ve been a late-comer to the Volokh Conspiracy party — I remember hearing its name for many years and skimming many posts before realizing why it was such a big deal, and worth reading regularly — but lately it has become one of my favorite blogs for political commentary.
Today Eric Posner has an excellent post called “What is the ‘ownership society’?” with many excellent observations about the mixed bag that politicians have promoted in the name of “ownership.”
Eric begins:
This term ["ownership society"] cropped up on in a recent NYT article which blames the financial crisis on Bush administration policies, including its advocacy of an ownership society. The article goes too far: the financial crisis is the result of bipartisan regulatory decisions going back decades and the Fed’s easy money policies—and it is important to understand that financial crises will almost certainly occur even when government regulators do everything right. They are like hurricanes: we can blame the government for failing to build strong levees but not for failing to stop the hurricane from forming over the Atlantic ocean. If the hurricane is bad enough, even strong levees will do no good. (A lot of people also blame market actors but that does not make much sense. People act rationally or greedily or stupidly, as they always have, and blaming them for the financial crisis is just another way of arguing that government regulation was inadequate. Might as well blame hurricanes for destroying cities.)
But what is the “ownership society,” anyway? It is a political slogan that the Bush administration apparently first used in 2003 to refer to three of its policy goals: (1) privatization of Social Security; (2) the creation of private health care accounts; and (3) subsidization of home ownership. The underlying theme is that it is better if people own than if they do not own, but what does this mean? Ownership compared to what?
Read Posner’s full post for insights about what each of these goals really consists of, why they are a mixed bag for anyone who truly advocates ownership-as-in-private-property, and how they relate to the present financial crisis.
PS. This is the second post I’ve written on my new MacBook Pro. I hope to write a post soon about what it’s been like, making The Switch. The short version: A very good experience, overall, but marred by a few problems that I’m surprised Apple didn’t iron out long ago, given their record of cutting-edge innovation.
