Democracia de cidadãos proprietários e regras legais do mercado

Abstract

The article presents property-owning democracy (one of the types of regimes that Rawls deems prone to satisfy the principles of his conception of justice) as a predistributive regime. This may be understood in two senses. First, property-owning democracy is predistributive in the sense of including measures to influence market results in order to avoid great inequality (and thus reduce the need for redistributive measures). Second, the term “predistribution” can also be constructed as associated with productive relationships characterized by a low concentration of power. Taking these two meanings into account, the paper distinguishes three classes of measures or strategies of predistribution: a) transfers; b) measures for dispersing human capital e c) market legal rules, including rules pertaining to traditional areas of private law, such as property law, contracts and torts. It is then argued that the potential of the first two kind of measures is limited, so that the idea of attributing a predistributive role to market rules, although to some extent problematic in itself, should not be discarded.