John Rawls: Property-Owning Democracy

John Rawls, as we saw last time on Then & Now, came to the following conclusions about what a just society should like. He said that: ‘‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values, is to everyone’s advantage.’’ But what would this look like in practice? It’s only in recent years that attention has begun to be focused on how this might be implemented politically. Rawls barely addressed this question, but he did suggest two possible systems: liberal or democratic socialism, and property-owning democracy, and while he said that justice as fairness is agnostic between them, he leaned towards the latter. So what is a property-owning democracy? Property-owning democracy means citizens have a real stake in the productive capital of society, some ownership of the means of production. He writes: ‘Property-owning democracy avoids [inequalities], not by redistributing income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (educated abilities and trained skills) at the beginning of each period’. If all citizens have a stake in a sizeable amount of property, access to capital and the productive decisions of society, it prevents power from resting in the hands of the few. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JJ76W4CZ2A8J2 Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/2ykJe6L Follow me on: Facebook: http://fb.me/thethenandnow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thethenandnow/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lewlewwaller Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/then-now-philosophy-history-politics/id1499254204 https://open.spotify.com/show/1Khac2ih0UYUtuIJEWL47z Sources: Thad Williamson, Who Owns What? An Egalitarian Interpretation of John Rawl’s Idea of a Property-Owning Democracy Martin O’Neill, Liberty, Equality and Property-Owning Democracy Tom Malleson, Rawls, Property-Owning Democracy, and Democratic Socialism John Rawls, A Theory of Justice John Rawls, Justice as Fairness Gavin Kerr, ‘Predistribution’, property-owning democracy and land value taxation