Introduction

Market economies are crucial for efficiency. But market economies also tend to generate significant inequality. In recent years, Britain has experienced not only an increase in income inequality, but an increase of inequality in wealth; not only a rise in income poverty, but a rise in asset poverty (Paxton and Dixon, 2004). Since the birth of industrial capitalism towards the end of the 18th century, however, one idea has insistently resurfaced as a proposal for moderating inequality of wealth in market economies. This is the proposal to endow all citizens on maturity with a generous capital grant as of right, or what we term a citizen's stake. For Thomas Paine, writing in the 1790s, the goal was to endow each adult on maturity with the sum of £15, with which they could buy a cow and implements to cultivate a few acres of land (Paine, 1987 [1797]). The Child Trust Fund, recently introduced by the Labour government in Britain, represents a modest variant on this idea of a citizen's stake. In this book, we explore how (if at all) the principle of the citizen's stake might be further developed. This introduction does three things. First, in section 1, we clarify the normative arguments which support the idea of a citizen's stake. Second, in section 2, we briefly explain the recently introduced Child Trust Fund. Section 3 then sets out the concrete policy questions we intend to explore in this book, and explains how each chapter relates to them.

The motivation for the citizen's stake

Why should we be interested in establishing a generous citizen's stake? What arguments, historically, and in our own day, are made to support the proposal? Into what wider vision of society does the proposal fit? Philosophically, four ideas play a key role in arguments for a citizen’s stake: natural rights; freedom; welfare; and equality of opportunity (see Dowding et al, 2003, for a related discussion that informs that here).