A property-owning democracy is a social system whereby state institutions enable a fair distribution of productive property across the populace generally, rather than allowing monopolies to form and dominate.
[5]: 173 Similarly, Rawls contrasts property-owning democracy against socialist forms of governance, which are thought to dismiss basic individual liberties in a manner that is inconsistent with democratic values.
[4]: 4 Property-owning democracies promote the power of institutions to implement policies and taxes that regulate the inheritance and acquisition of private property, in order to disperse wealth and capital throughout the population.
[3]: 51 Concentrated ownership of the means of production in a near monopoly creates a situation in which labour must depend upon their employers for wages in a relationship of unequal bargaining power, causing wealth to increasingly accumulate at the top quintile of society.
[5]: 180 It is then problematic that the candidates elected for public office are generally those supported by economic elites, through the provision of individual and corporate donations that are required to run successful political campaigns.
[5]: 174 Such practices are illustrated in the Princeton University study into wealth's corruption of politics, which found: "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
[6]: 169 It would include the development of human capital through publicly funded education, free healthcare, an adequate social minimum and policies that seek to ensure the equal participation of individuals within the political society.
Proponents of property-owning democracy would claim that this form of social structure produces socioeconomic classes, at the base of which sits a demoralised grouping who are dependent upon state-sanctioned welfare.
[4]: 2 The fair equality of opportunity acts to assure that wealth and property ownership cannot improve and manipulate an individual's place in the social order, particularly in relation to their access to education, healthcare, employment and housing.
[2]: 75 The universal value of this social system is also limited by its particular bias toward Western ways of thinking, whilst ignoring the pluralistic cultural, religious, philosophical and economic differences worldwide.
Proponents of welfare-state capitalism critique property-owning democracy for too liberally dismissing the role of individual differences of skill, intelligence and physiological qualities to produce divergent outcomes.
[7]: 396 It is more appropriate, from the perspective of welfare-state capitalism, to provide a social minimum whereby those individuals who struggle to convert their capabilities into economic benefits are assured a basic standard of living, without mandating that they be gifted equal ownership over productive property which they have not earned.
[7]: 401 Advocates of state socialism criticise property-owning democracy for its soft principles on property redistribution, which fail to effectively enable an equal ownership over the means of production.
While property-owning democracy asserts the value of redistributing productive property, liberal socialism claims to achieve the end goal of equal opportunity and political influence through means that are less coercive.