The Stakeholder Society

Is capital back? The role of land ownership and savings behavior

“…Accordingly, capital income taxes reduce output since they discourage capital investments. Atkinson (2015) takes up the idea of the stakeholder society (Ackerman and Alstott, 1999) and proposes, among other measures, to reduce inequality by endowing young households with a one-time transfer at adulthood. That transfer, according to Atkinson, should be financed by a wealth or inheritance tax.…”

Enlarging Political Imagination: Ideal Types of Social Systems and a Pluralistic Distributive Approach

“…But this is only a partial solution because we should attack the main mechanisms by which the wealthy are able to preserve their position at the top of the distribution: inheritance. Thus, the answer lies in knowing whether wealth and capital should be distributed and shared by means of a universal basic income (Van Parijs, 1995;Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017), capital endowment or a "minimal" inheritance for all (Ackerman and Alstott, 1999;Piketty, 2020), or sovereign wealth funds (two examples of this sort of public institution might be the Alaska Permanent Fund or the Norwegian Statens Pensjonsfond Utland).…”

“…Secondly, and in addition to these measures, Piketty sketches two other forms of progressive taxation: an inheritance tax and an income tax. This triptych of progressive taxation -on property, inheritance, and income -mainly aims to finance and put in place a system of capital endowments (see Ackerman and Alstott, 1999) which should be paid to all young adults (say, at the age of 25), with the result of disseminating ownership at the bottom while limiting its concentration at the top (Piketty, 2020, p. 983). The idea is to design a progressive tax structure that does not disincentivize work, innovation, and productivity while, at the same time, avoiding wealth and income accumulation on the top levels; a sort of step-by-step progressive taxation system that reaches the marginal tax rates of 80% or 90% only for the positions at the very top (Piketty, 2020, p. 985).…”

Predistribution and Unconditional Basic Income

“…This egalitarian ideal of predistributive dispersal of the ownership of productive assets turns out to be more ambitious since it calls into question the idea of a natural free market. This dispersion of external resources can be done in many ways that correspond to and "egalitarian toolkit" (White, 2015), through for example the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund that would make it possible to pay to each citizen a social dividend financed by a tax levied on all external assets, either in the form of a "capital grant" (Ackerman & Alstott, 1999), or under that of a basic income (Van Paris & Vanderborght, 2017), or granting each citizen a right to "access the commons" (Bollier & Helfrich, 2014;Merrill, 2017b), aimed at ensuring equal opportunities to exercise our economic freedoms. In this vein, it is particularly important to explore the relationship between the predistribution and the pursuit of an unconditional basic income as the latter falls squarely within the conception of predistribution outlined in the preceding paragraphs.…”