On September 17, 2013, Robert Reich writes on NationOfChange.org:
…if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s too bad; it’s just the outcome of the market.
No, it is the outcome of OWNING productive capital assets versus NOT OWNING and solely dependent on a job for income. As tectonic shifts in the technologies of production will continue to transpire, jobs will further be destroyed (which increases the number of people seeking employment) and the worth of labor devalued, as well as by globalization, which shifts employment to other countries where labor is less costly as well as regulations and controls.
Robert Reich confuses the incomes that the wealthy rich class earn with the incomes earned from labor. The reason the rich are rich is because their earnings are generated by their ownership of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets––not a job! Labor workers ONLY have a job (and increasingly less opportunity for good-paying jobs) as their source of income.
This deplorable situation will worsen as long as we as a nation fail to address the REAL problem at the root of income inequality and poverty––CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital. And to advocate for solutions that systematically broaden private sector individual ownership of the formation of FUTURE productive capital investment to empower EVERY American to accumulate over time a viable capital trust (super-IRA) portfolio of stock in diversified companies and reap the full earnings payout of corporate earnings as dividend income to support their livelihood and retirement.
The rules can even be designed to entrench and enhance the wealth of a few at the top, and keep almost everyone else comparatively poor and economically insecure. Which brings us to the central political question: Who should decide on the rules, and their major purpose? If our democracy was working as it should, presumably our elected representatives, agency heads, and courts would be making the rules roughly according to what most of us want the rules to be. The economy would be working for us.
Instead, the rules are being made mainly by those with the power and resources to buy the politicians, regulatory heads, and even the courts (and the lawyers who appear before them). As income and wealth have concentrated at the top, so has political clout. And the most important clout is determining the rules of the game.
Not incidentally, these are the same people who want you and most others to believe in the fiction of an immutable “free market.”
If we want to reduce the savage inequalities and insecurities that are now undermining our economy and democracy, we shouldn’t be deterred by the myth of the “free market.” We can make the economy work for us, rather than for only a few at the top. But in order to change the rules, we must exert the power that is supposed to be ours.
What is needed is leadership and government policies that result in the enrichment of EVERY citizen, not just those who already OWN America. How to achieve this solution is outlined in “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624 and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.nationofchange.org/income-solution-slow-private-sector-job-growth-1378041490.
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