January 28, 2004, 8:56 a.m.
Investor Class, Investor Nation
America is becoming an "ownership society," a seismic development.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the February 9, 2004, issue of National Review.
It was not hard to find, during our recent bear market, a certain schadenfreude abroad in the land. We had been warned that the previous boom was fated to end; that the boom was, indeed, an illusion, a bubble that would burst any day now; and that all the people who had put their money in the markets without a care would discover to their horror that they could go down as well as up, and pull out their money. When the market started to fall, everyone who had been a bear amid the bulls felt entitled to say: I told you so. Such people should not be begrudged what joy they are capable of experiencing.
Sometimes, the recriminations took on a more ideological cast. Liberals ridiculed free-market enthusiasts for having suggested that individuals should be free to put some of their Social Security money in the markets. They had supposedly made this suggestion based on the naïve belief that the Dow would rise, without interruption, to 36,000 and beyond.
Also dismissed was the notion that the 1990s had seen an expansion of capital ownership that had shifted American politics to the right and would continue to do so. Nobody could deny that a change had occurred. The number of Americans who owned stock, either directly or through a pension plan, had increased from a fifth of households in the early 1980s to over half of them by the end of the 1990s. Richard Nadler, a conservative activist, called the new stockowners "worker-capitalists." The conservative eco
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