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英国的婴儿基金、平等股权与基督教文化传统 北京大军经济观察研究中心主任 仲大军 2006年10月28日 最近看了清华大学崔之元教授传来的两篇文章，谈得是英国在平等股权（equal shares)思想的指导下，推行了婴儿基金计划，以保障全体人民的基础平等，很受启发和感动。 婴儿基金的诞生基于这样一个事实：在英国，有一半的人口没有家庭储蓄，收入仅够维持即期生存，他们子女无力受教育，往往上学到十六七岁就去工作挣钱了。而中产阶级家庭的孩子有稳定的财富保障使他们完成全面的教育，从而使自己立于社会工作的顶端。这种天生基础的不平等实际上是不公平的。英国人于是设计了婴儿基金，给每个出生的孩童一笔钱，保证他能受到一定程度的教育。英国人追求平等已经达到这种程度了，可我们还在一味拉大收入差距，一味制造新贵族，新少爷。由此看出中英两国在思想理念上的差距。 更值得关注的是第二篇文章《婴儿券的逻辑基础》，这篇文章全面叙述了欧洲国家平等思想的文化传统，在基督教文化中，在《旧约》一书中有一个说法，那就是每隔50年世界迎来一次喜庆，在这一时刻，奴隶得到自由，土地归还原主，负债人的债务消失，穷富人化为一样。这种重新均衡和平等的思想不仅影响了后来欧洲的无政府主义，影响了马克思的共产主义的诞生，还影响了欧美国家的企业家。譬如，美国的石油大亨洛克菲勒、钢铁大王卡内基都是圣经文化的被影响者。当他们积聚起巨大的财富后，又将这些财富重归社会。 卡内基有句名言：“在巨富中死去是一种耻辱。”正是在这种思想的指导之下，卡内基将巨大的资金投向社会福利和慈善事业。今天这种思想仍然影响着西方社会。比尔·盖茨都接受了这种文化传统的影响。 而中国在接受了西方的资本主义制度的同时，却摈弃了西方宝贵的公平和平等精神。这使中国的资本主义变得残酷而丑陋。看看今天的民间资本和社会财富，有多少用于公共的发展？中国的文化传统在哪里？中国传统的财富观是什么？只是帝王无限度的挥霍奢侈，达官显贵无休止的用于个人及家族的发展。 因此，比较东西方传统文化的差异，西方有财富均衡和共享的思想，东方只有个人和家族的富贵和发达。中国文化是血缘文化，强调有血缘关系的群体的发展，因此，中国的财富首先是血缘财富，然后才能上升到社会财富。这大概就是儒教文化与基督教文化的不同。 无限止地发展个人，还是发展全体社会？在西方商业文化风靡中国的时候，今天读读这些文章，对我国社会是有好处的。 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 阅读文章： The saving grace of the baby bond The child trust fund will turn hopes into realistic ambition Tony
Blair The child trust fund, introduced in yesterday's Budget, is a big, progressive idea with far-reaching consequences for extending opportunity in Britain. It flows from our belief that the duty of government is not just to attack entrenched privileges that hold people back, but to vigorously promote equality in life chances. It is a decisive moment in our second-term mission to create a society that is open, genuinely based on merit and the equal worth of all. Many middle-class children grow up safe in the knowledge that when they want to buy their own home, go to university or get their first job, they will have the cushion and comfort of financial support. This allows them to progress, fulfil their dreams, and stand on their own two feet in the world. It gives them a chance to form networks of support, to gain a foothold on the ladder of opportunity. Those benefits are not extended throughout society. Too many children are excluded from life-chances before they are born because of poverty. They are forced to leave school at 16, not 18, to begin earning. They lack the capital to pay deposits or stamp duty on a first home. They are daunted 为难by the prospect of going to university. Their ambitions are diminished at an early age. They lack the wealth that is the springboard 跳板，出发点of opportunity. The evidence is stark. Nearly half the households in Britain earning less than £200 a week have no savings; 72% of single parents have no savings at all; one in 10 households now have no assets - twice as many as in the early 1980s; and nearly a third of individuals have no financial savings or assets of any kind. This denial of opportunity is not just ethically wrong. In the 21st-century, information-age economy, the most important resource of a firm or a country is not its raw materials, or a favourable geographical location, but the skills of the whole workforce. Prosperity for a company or a country can be secured only if we get the best out of all our people. Asset redistribution is a vital means of achieving it. Assets make an impact by encouraging planning for the future, raising aspirations and promoting engagement in communities through investment in wealth and enterprise. Asset ownership is not only critical to advancing individual opportunity. It is a crucial weapon against poverty, long-term unemployment and the inequalities passed from one generation to the next. Overcoming the inequalities of wealth and income that hold people back is one of the greatest challenges facing Britain. We should aspire to be not just a democracy of property-owners, but a democracy in which ownership of wealth is open to all. The modernisation of our welfare system is intended not just to improve access to jobs, income and public services, but to ensure that all have a stake in the wealth of our nation. I want to see every child get the best possible start in life, able to make the most of their ability. I believe in the vision advanced 30 years ago by Tony Crosland in The Future of Socialism of every family having the aspirations and self-belief that come naturally to the middle classes. That is why the child trust fund was at the centre of our election manifesto. It was worked up in close collaboration with think tanks on the centre-left, with the support of the IPPR and the Fabian Society, children's charities and financial service organisations. Ideas were shared, the practicalities carefully considered and refined. When I launched the proposal on 26 April 2001, I said: "This approach will give real meaning to creating a meritocratic society. It will extend to children everywhere the opportunities that might be taken for granted higher up the income ladder." We have seen the vision through. We are extending to everyone what the affluent take for granted. Our baby bond bestows to each child the advantages that come from reaching adulthood backed by a financial nest-egg, and extends the savings habit to all. For every child born after September 2002 we will establish the fund in its name. Around 700,000 babies are born each year in Britain. For each new-born child we will make an initial endowment of at least £250, rising to £500 for the poorest children. It is a universal and progressive reform that will benefit everyone, with more to those who need it most. Each child will receive additional payments into their fund, and parents and extended family can also make contributions. At the age of 18, the fund will accumulate an asset base of several thousand pounds, enabling all young people to have the chances only available to some today. The next generation will have the backing of a real financial asset to invest in activities such as learning, buying a home or setting up a business. Assistance with building up financial resources for the future comes on the basis of families saving together, balancing rights and responsibilities, and strengthening mutual obligation in our society. 婴儿基金券和平等股权的逻辑基础 The logic of the Baby BondSamuel Brittan: Prospect 08/03 Review of Equal Shares? Building a Progressive and Coherent Asset-Based Welfare Policy, Will Paxton (Ed), Institute for Public Policy Research, £8.95 The 19th Century French anarchist socialist. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, achieved fame with his dictum 格言 “property is theft”. 财产是赃物！This has been one underlying socialist theme ever since. Karl Marx, who had contempt for Proudhon in everything else, took over the idea and envisaged that problems of poverty and maldistribution would be solved by some form of collective ownership of the means of production.
These aspects help explain an alternative radical tradition based on distributing assets more widely. The Old Testament 旧约decreed 颁布 that every 50th year should be a Jubilee 喜庆 in which all land would be returned to its original owners, debts cancelled, slaves set free, the land left fallow and transactions in the preceding half century annulled. 废除 There is no evidence that anything of this kind was ever attempted. But the injunction at least showed a recognition that capital ownership should not depend entirely on the accidents of heredity and past transfers. The Peruvian, Hernando de Soto, has recently attracted attention by proposing for the Third World a form of popular capitalism based on granting full property rights to the many forms of de facto property, such as extra legal small businesses and property owned by the poor in shanty towns (1). There are not so many hidden assets of this kind in the industrial West. Property ownership for most people takes the form of home ownership and/or pension rights whether in state or private schemes. Indeed the cheap sale of council houses was probably the most popular measure enacted by the Thatcher government, even though it was distributionally skewed and, as Paxton reminds us, did little to increase the wealth of those at the lower end. One problem with home ownership is that, despite equity withdrawal, houses are there basically for people to live in and do not become available as a nest egg or reserve unless or until the owner moves down the market in late middle age when his children have moved away and he trades down. Similarly, pension rights are not usually tradeable except at a substantial discount and are also a resource needed for later life. The benefits of individual property ownership have been sung by writers throughout the ages. Such ownership was regarded by Greek and Roman classical authors as a precondition of good citizenship. But they did not investigate the problems of those who had no assets - they took it for granted that many people, including slaves and foreigners, could not be citizens. The debate in its modern form goes back at least to the late 17th century English philosopher John Locke. His vindication of the rights of property depended on the belief that men had "mixed their labour" with it. I do not know how he would have replied to the observation that many of his fellow citizens did not have the opportunity to mix their labour with anything other than the crudest raw materials. My impression from his Treatises on Government is that his main concern was not with the distribution of property ownership but with laying a foundation for personal rights which despotic governments had no right to abrogate. It was in America that the small stakeholder movement first took root. Jeffersonian democracy - notoriously to subsequent generations who lived in industrial society - was based on the concept of small proprietors, mostly owner-farmers for whose benefit the nation's affairs should be run. Around the time of the French Revolution such ideas took a more radical form in the Old World, for instance in the writings of Thomas Paine. Later on in the 19th century the Gladstone supported an amendment to the 1886 Queen's Speech which advocated the goal of "three acres and a cow" to help landless labourers. The slogan came from Joseph Chamberlain's "unofficial programme" and was probably adopted by the Liberal leader as an expedient to vote the Salisbury Tory Government out of office, which it temporarily succeeded in doing. Widespread citizen ownership was more seriously espoused by the political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who advocated an inheritance tax of a progressive kind, based on the size of the legacy rather than the wealth of the deceased. The object was to encourage people to spread their wealth on death as widely as possible. This proposal has since been backed by innumerable respectable political economists, including the late Lionel Robbins, whom no-one could have called a hellfire revolutionary. Yet even this modest change in tax and inheritance law has still to be made. The 20 century political economist Friedrich Hayek believed that the advantages of unearned income were so great that if no other method existed, one in a hundred persons should be given substantial sums by lot. The question now arises whether advanced western countries are now affluent enough to spread some of the benefits of property ownership to all inhabitants rather than to rely on inheritance or the luck of the draw alone. The Conservative Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, best known for the Suez debacle, spoke about a "property owning democracy". But the Tory governments of the 1950's and 60's did little to promote it, apart from tax reliefs for mortgages and private pensions, which distorted the property market and the general economy far more than they effectively redistributed wealth. Left wing thinkers have woken up very late in the day to the fact that property ownership is far more concentrated than earned income; and that it makes little sense to inveigh against corporate "fat cats", or impose high marginal rates of tax on executives and professionals, when these people's wealth is trivial compared with the sums that still pass on at death in the face of estate duties which still remain a voluntary tax for those who take legal advice in time or trust their descendants. Recently, the idea of a citizen stake has attracted radicals across the political spectrum. Two US authors, Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott had espoused it in their widely discussed book The Stakeholder Society (3). It has also been espoused by Julian Le Grand of the London School of Economics. David Owen canvassed it for the Social Democrats as early as 1984 and David Willetts, the current Conservative social security spokesman, has promoted it under the title Asset Based Welfare. The natural home for asset based welfare is surely, however, the "radical centre". This was a name invented decades ago by The Economist journal to describe those political moderates who were not content to split the difference between extremes but were interested in more innovative ideas than either left or right felt comfortable with. It is against this impressive, but not yet mainstream, advocacy that Gordon Brown's scheme for a Child Trust Fund, introduced in the 2003 Budget, needs to be viewed. The media assumption was that this was a gimmick to disguise the fact that the Chancellor could afford few goodies in this particular Budget. What the pygmy commentators failed to notice was that for the first time a British government was committed to distribution of capital to citizens as distinct from welfare in kind, or social security payments. It was a first stab at distributing ownership of assets other than housing and pensions more widely. Asset distribution proposals were incorporated in the 2001 Labour election manifesto. But as they did not have the backing of any powerful lobby, it would have been easy for the Chancellor to have postponed the project indefinitely; and it is to his credit that he has not done so. It is now government policy that each new born infant should be provided with a small capital sum - £500 for the poorest third of families, falling to £250 for the rest - that would be invested in the financial markets and which bearers would be free to draw from the age of 18. The Treasury suggested that with further modest contributions from the Exchequer at a later stage and a five per cent real return on equity, the capital stake could eventually be worth some £1,600 per head. The annual Exchequer cost of the scheme is put at £230m - less than a tenth of the additional sums provided for the Iraq War. Moreover it will not be a substantial drain on resources until the bonds become encashable in 18 years. Since the Budget the case for these baby bonds - and extending the idea much further - has been elaborated by Will Paxton and other authors in an IPPR paperback, Equal Shares?. They consider the arguments for the idea and also how to finance its enlargement and extension. It is not surprising that they are more successful in the former than the latter. The beauty of the "baby bond", as they explain is that in contrast to pensions or outright home ownership, they come in at the young end of the adult age group when people may be healthy and optimistic enough to enjoy them. The IPPR authors cite the usual statistics which exaggerate the concentration of wealth. For example the top one per cent of the population is said, on the basis of Inland Revenue figures, to hold over 20 per cent of all personal wealth. The weakness of such figures is that they are snapshot rather than lifetime comparisons. Suppose that lifetime wealth was equally distributed among all households. Many of them would still tend to start off with little wealth, or even net debts, but would gradually build up assets in the course of their working lives. They would then run them down in retirement, even if they left something over to bequeath to their children. It would thus be desirable to have some estimates of the distribution of wealth taking into account lifetime and other complications. Impartial analyses of distributional issues were indeed carried out by the Diamond Commission which was set up by the 1974-79 Wilson and Callaghan governments. It had as its senior economist a highly respected egalitarian scholar, the late Henry Phelps-Brown, who carried conviction when he explained how little there was then to be gained at that time from the traditional Labour policy of soaking the rich. He concentrated mainly on income, but such a Commission today could carry out a very useful job in examining the distribution of wealth. The Thatcher government made a big mistake in abolishing this Commission, as did the Blair government in not reinstating it. I do not want to exaggerate. The Office of National Statistics states that "wealth is considerably less evenly distributed than income"; and a substantial proportion of the population is asset poor even allowing for the normal accumulation of debt for house purchase and the start of a career. But a good case can only be made better if supported by more sophisticated and less tendentious estimates. Paxton provides four reasons for what he calls "progressive asset based welfare":
Surprise has been expressed that some of us, for whom equality is a false ideal achievable only in the graveyard if there, nevertheless back the baby bond idea and its possible extensions. Anyone curious about my own position will find it in an extremely short essay entitled "Redistribution Yes, Equality No"(3). In any case the arguments of Paxton read well enough if the words "wider distribution" are substituted for "equal distribution". Indeed he admits that he does not have in mind "all citizens possessing precisely equal shares." The fourth of his objectives is more problematic. The case for wider asset ownership is not helped by being so much entangled in the savings drive. Some Treasury draftsmen are inclined to treat baby bonds as simply one aspect of savings encouragement. But even without bringing in Keynesian considerations of the dangers of oversaving in recession, the appropriate attitude to savings versus consumption should be one of liberal neutrality. In fact one of the great advantages of baby bonds in enabling young people to "do their own thing" for a few years would be associated with dissaving - i.e. drawing on both baby bonds and some of their own savings. A large part of the first chapter of the IPPR book is taken up by schemes for converting the tax incentives of existing savings schemes into tax credits which would be of greater value to non or low taxpayers. This brings up the broader issue of whether taxation should be based on expenditure or income. There are at the moment so many separate and complex schemes to exempt from tax the income from various approved holdings, such as ISAs, that it seems tempting to go the whole hog and exempt the income from any form of savings. And if we ever had a comprehensive expenditure tax some other measures would be required to offset any regressive effects. In practice however legislators are never going to go the whole way either towards a comprehensive expenditure tax or a comprehensive income-based system. Thus I find myself somewhat reluctantly drawn to support the changes the IPPR advocates in savings incentives. Asset distribution is of course only one way of topping up the resources of the poor. The other approach is that of a basic income (not minimum wage) to ensure that everyone has a source of income outside the market and is definitely better off in moving from the dole to low paid jobs. Gordon Brown's integrated child credit and employment tax credit come close to providing a basic income subject to a "willing to work" test. There has unfortunately been something of a civil war between advocates of state-paid income top-ups on the one hand and asset distribution on the other. An advantage of asset distribution is that it is politically easier to introduce without the work test still insisted upon in income supplementation schemes. In some kinds of rational and far sighted worlds a regular basic income and popular capital endowment amount to the same thing. Lifetime basic income payments discounted at the appropriate interest rate are equivalent to a capital sum. And anyone who receives this sum on achieving adult status would be able either to enjoy the income from his or her capital at a steady rate or borrow on the strength of it. So on libertarian grounds a capital stake is to be preferred. But obviously not everyone has access to credit markets at prime rates. Moreover what do we propose to do about the prodigal son who spends his endowment at an early age and is not subsequently able to earn a market wage below the poverty level? It is most unlikely that a civilised society would let him starve. So both approaches will be required; and they are both so far outside conventional left-right arguments between advocates of tax cuts and of social services in kind that we need to move forward wherever there is a chink of light. The IPPR authors correctly point out how modest Gordon Brown's present proposals are, compared with for instance, Fabian proposals to provide every 18-year-old with £10,000 worth of assets or with the Ackerman plan for $80,000 per head. The weakness of the Brown proposals is that they are to be financed entirely from revenue. If such ideas are to make a big contribution to a wider distribution of wealth some other sources of funds, preferably of a capital nature, needs to be found. I originally proposed in the late 1970s that state revenue from North Sea oil should be earmarked for citizen dividends which could be capitalised on the stock market. No political party took the slightest interest. Another missed opportunity was the Conservative decision to sell privatisation shares at bargain prices rather than distribute them freely to everyone - a proposal incidentally supported by Milton Friedman. Yet another missed chance was the capital receipts from the sale of mobile telephone licences which were unimaginatively devoted towards repaying the National Debt. Some experiments have been made in some of the former communist countries in distributing shares in privatised companies as a nominal price. But the lack of a capitalist culture has made these countries difficult soil. The allotments to citizens have sometimes fallen prey to Mafia financiers who have bought them up cheaply. Alaska has been much more successful in distributing to its inhabitants state income from oil extraction. There will be other opportunities if only policymakers would look for them. An obvious one staring us in the face is the increment of land value resulting either from planning permission or the extension of public facilities, such as the Jubilee Line in London. Not far from the Financial Times in Southwark, South London, a property developer named Don Riley has an office which looks out over a site that was available for purchase in 1980 for £100,000. In January 2000 it was sold for £2.6m. The gain was "money in the bank" for the owners but nothing was contributed to the general welfare" (4). Land taxation has the advantage over other forms that it is in principle based on pure space and need not be a disincentive to either capital or labour. This was noticed as long ago in the early 19th century by the classical economist David Ricardo. Towards the end of that century the American social reformer Henry George advocated a Single Tax on land ownership as the main source of government revenue. The Attlee government attempted to nationalise development values, but its plans floundered in a morass of legal and political complication. These matters will all need to be looked at again. But as a very simple practical proposal, why not auction planning permission? Many local authorities have approached this piecemeal by making such permission conditional on the provision of services such as leisure centres, approach roads and so on. Why not however return this windfall to the taxpayer in the form of asset distribution and let citizens decide how to spend it? Meanwhile anything which shifts public discussion from endless obsession with state delivery of services in kind to ways in which people could provide for themselves is highly welcome. 1) The Mystery of Capital,
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