On February 10, 2012, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® and the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) welcomed presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the featured speaker at their cosponsored Presidential Series breakfast.
“Technology and innovation, and their role in spurring the nation’s economic growth, will be important issues in the 2012 presidential election, and today we heard from one candidate who understands what entrepreneurs and businesses need.”
Introducing Governor Romney, Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of CEA, remarked, “If we tasked headhunters with selecting a president based on relevant management and government experience, financial and budgeting acumen, leadership and integrity, they would identify Mitt as a top candidate. Mitt has a vision and a passion for the nation. And it revolves around excellence, innovation, technology and tapping into what makes us great as Americans.”
Romney repeatedly spoke to the need for an economic and governmental climate that supports and promotes innovation. If elected president, Romney stated, he would make important changes to grow America’s innovation economy including changing government regulation to encourage risk, opening markets for American goods abroad, and improving immigration policies so that foreign-born, American-educated individuals can stay in America and contribute to the U.S. economy.
“Governor Romney’s vision for American competitiveness and a culture of innovation reflect that of CEA’s own Innovation Movement,” said Shapiro. To join CEA’s Innovation Movement for free, visit DeclareInnovation.com. “Technology and innovation, and their role in spurring the nation’s economic growth, will be important issues in the 2012 presidential election, and today we heard from one candidate who understands what entrepreneurs and businesses need.”
Gary Reber Comments: While innovation is the engine of technology, the core function of technology is to save labor. People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention.
We should all be productive and produce products and services in a way in which the current state of technology permits. Not only is your right to life denied if you don’t have effective access to the ownership of capital, your liberty is denied because without economic power your political power is useless. Thus, the national economic policy should be universal participation in the ownership of productive capital, alongside full employment of the labor workforce as a direct result.
We need to change direction and systematically build earning power into consumers, we have the opportunity to reverse the depression perpetrated by systematically limiting the 99 percent to labor wages alone and through technology eliminating their jobs. We need solutions to grow the economy in ways that create productive jobs and widespread equity sharing. We need to systematically make capital credit to purchase capital accessible to economically underpowered people (the 99 percenters) in which the income from the capital investment is isolated until it pays for itself, and then begins to produce a stream of dividend income to the new capitalists.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
Candidate Romney needs to understand. How difficult is it to understand that there are two factors that comprise the production of products and services: humans and non-humans (all those “things” used productively such a land, structures, machines, computers, etc––the instruments of technology). How difficult is it to realize that it is non-human productive capital, not labor, that exponentially produces the wealth in a technologically advanced society. How difficult is it to realize that what we really need in this 2012 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.
Mitt Romney and all the other candidates need to understand and recognize that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
Thus far it is obvious that Romney is not prepared and his thinking must be that of falsely presuming that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system––ignoring the continued concentration of ownership and the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity.
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented by the 2012 presidential election to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject. How else will the system change?
