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I want to go back to the ideal that John put forward. He wants a society in which everyone has the freedom and resources to develop their capacities and carry out their personal projects. I want that too.

The question in my mind is "How do we develop that society and what would its institutions look like?"

I want to throw out a concept that we have not yet mentioned. It was proposed by John Rawls, but you don't have to agree with Rawls's basic principles of justice in order to support this idea. It is the idea of a property-owning democracy.

Rawls believed that his principles of justice could be implemented under what he called liberal socialism or in what he called a property owning democracy. In a property owning democracy, the central idea is that there is very wide spread ownership of productive goods like land and factories and small businesses. He also believed that our current society, which we might call welfare state capitalism, served very poorly as a basis for a just society. I agree with him. And I would add that it serves very poorly as a basis for achieving John's ideal.

For Rawls, there were several problems with the welfare state. For one thing, it does not sufficiently guarantee equality of opportunity. For another, it allows "very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of the economy and much of political life rests in few hands."

In my opinion, the problem of huge inequalities of wealth and income is one of the greatest problems we face -- and it is directly traceable to our system of property rights. Those inequalities result in gigantic inequalities in political and economic power.

But let's go back to the ideal John put forward. In our society, the poor never have the resources required to develop their capacities or carry out their own plans and projects. In a word, they never come close to the ideal that John described.

The hope is that a property owning democracy would get beyond these problems. It would distribute resources that would allow John's ideal society to take shape. But it requires setting up a system of property that limits the accumulation of huge fortunes and drastically reduces poverty. In other words, it rests on a particular set of property rights and other institutions.