On December 21, 2013, Robert Reich writes on Nation Of Change:
Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $648 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal than it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
The inequality of opportunity to empower EVERY citizen to become a productive capital owner is the REAL source of economic inequality.
Full Production and Equal Ownership Opportunity should be the top economic priority if we are to put our nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice!
We will never realize a full-employment society unless we reform the system and break the lock by the present wealthy ownership class that ensures that the FUTURE will continue to be owned by them. Full employment, other than taxpayer extracted and incurred national debt make-work dependency, must rely on real economic growth. And even then it would be a relatively short-run endeavor during the time period it takes to build a FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen. The technology exists to employ human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc., which holds the promise of eliminating human toil work and significantly improve production efficiencies as the FUTURE economy is built.
Our national economic policy needs to eliminate all barriers to enabling productive capital acquisition to take place through commercially insured capital credit. By doing so the result would be a quiet revolution in which economic plutocracy will transform to economic democracy.
It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
For specific policy solutions see the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797 and support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm.
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