On October 2, 2012, the day before the first televised Presidential Debate, Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer for The Washington Post writes:
Will the questions in the presidential debates reflect the concerns of the Beltway and financial elites, or those of the 99 percent?
But given that our country is so deep in the red because government has assumed much of the debt that ordinary Americans took on over the past quarter-century, and that ordinary Americans took on that debt because they were offered loans when their incomes stopped rising, how about some questions that touch on the most important development in the nation’s economy for the past several decades: the stagnation and decline of household income?I’d like to hear both President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s take on what’s behind this epochal shift in the U.S. economy. Why have wages gone nowhere while productivity andprofits have increased? Is globalization to blame? If so, does that call for changes in our trade policy with nations such as China? Is the way to increase competitiveness in a global economy to reduce our wage levels to those in the developing world? If so, how low should we go?
The fundamental problem is that as a result of the objective of businesses constantly seeking to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum to maximize profits for their owners and technologic shifts in the technologies of production in which private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role, our economy is failing because we continue to create an imbalance in production and consumption. Until we enact policies that expand and broaden private, individual ownership in FUTURE income-producing productive capital––productive land and resources, structures, human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerization, etc embodied in the assets of our business corporations––more and more people will not be able to find jobs to support a livelihood and consumption of the products and services that can be produced, and will become dependent on government (taxpayer redistribution and national debt) welfare, open and concealed.
The focus needs to be on creating an OWNERSHIP CULTURE and and policies aimed specifically at OWNERSHIP CREATION, which when implemented will result in REAL JOB CREATION and opportunities for EVERY child, woman and man to become a new capitalist and benefit from the earnings of their productive capital estate and from employment.
The proposed reforms that I and others are advocating would grow a truly just and free enterprise economy, creating millions of private sector jobs and turning this country into a nation where every child, woman and man could become a capital owner, without redistributing property from current owners. See Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler’s 1958 book The Capitalist Manifesto and their 1961 book The New Capitalists: A Proposal For Freeing Economic Growth From The Slavery Of (Past) Savings (download free at http://www.cesj.org/cesjsitemap.html).
Our proposed systemic reforms to the tax, monetary, finance, inheritance, labor and welfare systems are based on the sound moral, political and economic principles espoused by Kelso and Adler and supported by the great thinkers of the past. This new vision would offer a truly genuine “Second American Revolution” of radically centrist “bottom-up” ideas based on the inherent dignity of every human person. It took a civil war to eliminate the institution of human slavery, the original sin of this great nation. Our challenge today is to eliminate wage slavery, welfare slavery and debt slavery, while minimizing charity slavery.
Such a new strategic goal would be guided by universal principles of economic and social justice that would lift American political debates from the politics of greed (the right) or those of envy (the left). Such a new goal would restore America’s moral leadership in the world. How? By uniting all Americans across today’s ideological spectrum, from far right to far left, behind a “solution” that would systematically create a truly new constituency working together to build a more economically just, high tech, sustainable growth economy. Uniquely such a just free market economy could be achieved without depriving current capitalists of property rights over their existing assets and would radically reduce and eventually eliminate government redistribution of income.
Please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
Also follow the Center for Economic and Social Justice at www.cesj.org and http://capitalhomestead.org/ Join the OWN Team at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-on-team
Also see The Kelso Institute at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/
Join the OWN Team to advocate OWNERSHIP CREATION at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-own-team The only commitment is to participate in the Weekly Action Point, which is usually just a Facebook post. Other activities are strictly voluntary!
