Expanding Ownership
by Ronald Reagan
October 1980
Op-Ed
It is no secret that the American economy is in trouble. Federal deficits spending has fueled the fires of inflation. More and more Americans are suffering the anguish of unemployment – Americans who, in a strong and vibrant economy would be producing wealth for the benefit of the people of this nation. Government is claiming an ever-increasing portion of citizen income to pay for programs too often riddled with waste, fraud, and irresponsibility.
These baneful trends can be reversed. The method is clear. Americans deserve a major across the board tax cut. Runaway spending must be restrained; fraud and waste identified and eliminated. Excessive regulation of business must be cut back. Honest value must be restored to the dollar. Americans must be given new incentives to save, invest and produce.
But yet more must be done to restore and maintain this nation’s economic well-being. For we must make sure that the ownership of America’s great productive wealth remains broadly distributed among the American people.
Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of Liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of this country.
The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.
Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?
Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation’s wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?
Could there be anything resembling a free government, where citizens without property dared not to resist the commands of the few who controlled their livelihoods?
Could any country be a land of free men and women, where the pride and independence of property ownership was reserved to the few, while the majority existed in dependency and servility?
It should be clear to everyone that the nation’s steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy?
This is not to say that the government should confiscate from the “haves” and bestow upon the “have-nots”, beyond the requirements of a compassionate welfare programs to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. Far from it. But it is to say that our duty is to foster a strong, vibrant, wealth-producing economy which operates in such a way presently have little or no ownership stake in their countries future.
This is not a new policy. Jefferson and Adams, Webster and Lincoln, Cleveland and Wilson – all understood its importance. But it is a policy that needs strong new emphasis in an age where its basic truth has sometimes been forgotten and removed from public discourse.
No one in public life today has done more to foster a reawakened understanding of this policy then Louisiana’s Senator Russell Long, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He has been responsible for several of the recent tax law provisions to encourage our nation’s industries to create various kinds of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), through which workers can acquire an ownership stake in their companies. He has been a strong and effective voice in the nation’s council for a policy of expanded ownership for all.
The nation’s next president should call upon Congressional leaders like Senator Long to work with him to ensure that all Americans have a fair chance to become owners of property in their country. For if such a policy is not adopted, the bright ideals of this nation may fall prey to the fate which the Founding Fathers feared – the domination of concentrated power which stifles liberty, free enterprise, self-government, and the sacred rights of man.
