Individual development accounts, citizen-based trust funds, basic capital grants, broadened stock ownership, and other such ideas that are being refined, proposed, and discussed by today's asset building movement are not utterly unique creations. As the cliché puts it “There is nothing new under the sun."
In fact, at a number of times in the 20th century, social movements in the U.S. and the Great Britain espoused similar alternatives. In fact, an intensive conversation occurred in the British Labour Party in post-war Britain, among the so-called "revisionists." Anthony Crosland, James Meade, Arthur Lewis, G.D. H. Cole, and many others, who were seeking further effective, but feasible alternatives for increasing the freedom, security, and dignity of the working classes, beyond expanding the welfare state, increasing the power of trade unions, running a full employment economy, and nationalizing further industries.
Bob Jackson of Mansfield College, Oxford University, in his article, "Revisionism Reconsidered: ‘Property-Owning Democracy' and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-War Britain" states that Revisionist socialists of the 1950s and 1960s are typically depicted as advocates of the "Keynesian welfare state" route to economic equality . . . This is an over-simplification: while the revisionists supported the welfare state, they also aimed to promote equality by re-distributing private property and expanding social ownership, endorsing an egalitarian version of a "property-owning democracy."
He "first discusses the political ideals and calculations that motivated the revisionists' interest in this model of egalitarian strategy and then examines in turn three mutually reinforcing strands of policy that this goal generated: greater progressive taxation of wealth; measures to diffuse private property ownership and access to marketable skills; and the expansion of novel forms of social ownership." The latter included: subsidies for savings, social dividends from a universal citizens' trust, worker ownership, and a number of other options.
Jackson's article is available on the Internet in the journal, Twentieth Century British History 2005, Volume 16, Number 4, p. 416-440. Reading it is well worth its tour down memory lane.