MAKING RIGHTS MORE EQUAL

For my part, I am trying to develop an approach based on an equal right of access to fundamental goods: education, healthcare, and participation in politics. I have mentioned the example of the right to vote in Sweden, but it obviously doesn’t end with equal suffrage: when it comes to funding for political campaigns and the media, we can imagine more egalitarian systems. I’m also very much thinking about all that pertains to economic democracy, that is, equal participation in the decision-making within businesses. I’ve taken an interest in the system of codetermination or shared management that we see in Germany and Northern Europe, where up to 50 percent of the vote is allotted to representatives of the salaried workers. This is not enough, because when voting is evenly split, the shareholders always get the deciding vote, but all the same it means that if a group owns 10 or 20 percent of the capital, it can tip decisions in its favor, even when a shareholder owning 80 or 90 percent of the capital stands in opposition. This is a significant development, one that arose in Germany and Sweden in the wake of World War II. Shareholders in France, Britain, or the United States would heartily dislike this system.

Yet it would be possible to push things even further. I support the idea, for instance, that of the 50 percent of votes assigned to shareholders, no single shareholder could control more than 10 percent. Such a system would come closer to providing equality of power, while preserving the possibility, in very small businesses, that a person who had brought a certain amount of capital toward a personal project might wield a slightly larger share of votes than someone who hadn’t provided any capital but might be trying to get his or her own personal project approved.

This is the kind of thinking I’m trying to develop on the subject of equality in the face of economic clout. It doesn’t call for a complete equality of results, because people have diverse aspirations: individuals will develop different plans, and absolute equality doesn’t exist, neither when it comes to people’s professions nor their incomes. What level of income disparity would be reasonable, given the difference in individual outlooks and choices of activity, and what level might be necessary as an incentive for social and economic organization? Income ratios of from one to three, or from one to five, might be compatible with these goals. But ratios of one to fifty are certainly not justified, as any number of historical experiments have shown.

The orders of magnitude I mentioned strike me as representing acceptable levels of inequality, but it is clearly a question that a democratic process and public deliberation should decide. Yet that would call for an equal ability to influence the political scene, and we are a long way from that.