History
The term appears to have been used originally by President Bush (for example in a speech February 20, 2003 in Kennesaw, Georgia) as a phrase to rally support for his tax-cut proposals (Pittsburgh Post - Gazette, Bush OKs Funding Bill for Fiscal '03, Feb 21, 2003 Scott Lindlaw). From 2004 Bush supporters described the ownership society in much broader and more ambitious terms, including specific policy proposals concerning home ownership, medicine, education and savings.
The idea that the welfare of individuals is directly related to their ability to control their own lives and wealth, rather than relying on government transfer payments, is a longstanding one, particularly in British conservatism.
In a modern form its implementation was developed as a main plank of Thatcherism, and is traced back to David Howell, before 1970, with help from the phrase-maker Peter Drucker.
In political practice under Margaret Thatcher's administration, it was implemented by measures such as the sale at affordable prices of public housing to tenants (right to buy program), and privatization.
Read more about this topic: Ownership Society
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)