P resident George W. Bush’s "ownership society" is a seductive idea: who wouldn’t want to become the owner of their home, health care, retirement, and destiny? From the "home on the range" to the adulation heaped on high-tech entrepreneurs, the concept is rooted in the American experience. No other nation places more value on the importance of individual autonomy. Ultimately, however, Bush’s promise of an ownership society is an empty one. In exchange for ownership, we receive increased risk while the wealthy and corporate interests benefit, as in his Social Security privatization plan. In Bush’s world, everyone gets a little piece of the pie, but at the cost of giving the wealthy extremely large helpings. Bush has, in fact, exacerbated a long-running trend: not only is income inequality greater in the United States than in any other advanced society, but the ownership of wealth is literally feudal in nature–and getting more so. The top 1 percent garners more income than the bottom 100 million Americans taken together. A mere 1 percent of wealth-holders, however, own just under half of all financial assets. A slightly larger group, the top 5 percent, own roughly 70 percent of all business assets. In 2003, the top 1 percent alone received 57.5 percent of all capital gains, rent, interest, and dividend income.

With recent rollbacks of the estate tax, incentives for retirement savings from which the well-off disproportionately benefit, and tax cuts that reward wealth, these inequities will only deepen. Morally, this is offensive to progressives and anyone with even a semi-serious conception of justice. Practically, this is troubling–and should be–to people across the political spectrum, because societies in which wealth disparities are so great are unstable societies. Divisions are magnified. The bonds of citizenship and brotherhood are weakened. The social fabric is frayed. A nation that begins down this path ends up with a country that begins to look more like a developing nation in Latin America and Africa: high walls ...