RALEIGH – As some Republican members of Congress edge away from President George W. Bush’s call for personal savings accounts in Social Security, some longtime proponents of market-based reform seem to be yielding to despair. They shouldn’t be. No one ever suggested that proposing major changes to the signature program of the New Deal – and to the single-largest income-redistribution program on Earth – would lack for risk or succeed within a couple of months.

Understood correctly, introducing individual accounts to Social Security, as part of a comprehensive reform package, would be a huge leap forward for freedom. In a sense, it represents a huge tax cut. Instead of giving up a big chunk of their annual incomes in payroll taxes, and then trusting politicians to pay sizable benefits at the onset of disability of retirement, Americans would be able to route some share of their “contributions” directly into their own accounts.

While the cash flows might not immediately change, there is clearly a conceptual difference between the government taxing you for a “social insurance” program and the government requiring you to save your own money for retirement. The latter does reduce your freedom to control how and when you will save, but the former reducing your freedom more.

The other way that Social Security reform could advance the cause of freedom is by building stronger connections in the minds of voters between their personal financial interest, as capital owners, and the interest of firms engaged in capitalism. That is, those invested in financial assets have good reason to care about other issues of economic freedom: regulation, tax policy, free trade, property rights, and the like. For freedom to prevail in political debate, it needs adherents and allies. As someone once wrote, the electoral implications of fostering a new investor class may turn out to be more important that the direct fiscal or economic ones.

Don’t believe me? Democratic pollster John Zogby has done some work on these issues recently. His post-election polling found that 61 percent of those who called themselves members of the “investor class” voted for Bush, while 57 percent of those who didn’t voted for Kerry (admittedly this is only a rough proxy for free-market sentiment, given Bush’s uneven record and proclivity for spending, but I think you get the idea). What is more interesting is that this dynamic persists into voter subgroups: 60 percent of Hispanics, 55 percent of women, and 57 percent of union members who identified as “investor class” voted for Bush.

On Social Security itself, there is also room for optimism. A separate Zogby poll a few weeks ago found that voters approved the idea of individual accounts within Social Security by a 51 percent to 39 percent margin. Gallup recently polled support at 58 percent. Washington Post/ABC polling has it at 56 percent, up slightly since December. Young voters favor the accounts-based approach while older voters oppose it. But if retired or near-retired respondents are assured that their benefits won’t be affected by the bill – which is true for every version I know of – their opposition falls below 50 percent.

Don’t get panicky, folks. The cause of freedom will prevail here, even if it takes a while.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.