On June 17, 2012, the Daily Mail Reporter ran a YouTube story in which Roberto Unger, a former professor of Barack Obama, turned against his one-time student and publicly urged voters not to re-elect him. Obama studied jurisprudence and reinventing democracy with the professor. On YouTube video he details the reasons why he believes the President does not deserve a second term in the White House.
While there are numberous “uneducated” academics teaching a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional public policy studies and economists from all the conventional schools of economics, Harvard Professor Roberto Unger is not one of them. It is not too late for President Obama to take his advice, which is:
“The deepest cause of the financial and economic crisis that the United States has recently under gone is that the country stop producing at competitive prices enough products and services that the rest of the world wants. It then tried to escape the consequences of this failure by living as if the failure had not occurred. It put a fake credit democracy in place of the property-owing democracy that turned into an ever more distant idea. The government bribed, placated and finally abandoned the people instead of equipping them.
“What then should the program be. Have finance in the service of the real economy rather than allowing it to service itself. Broaden the gateways of access to the vanguards of innovative knowledge-based production and disseminate advanced experimental productive practices among the small and medium sized businesses that form the heart of the American economy. Make available to all Americans a type of education that accords priority to capabilities, both conceptual and practical of analysis, synthesis and recombination of ideas and of things. And to this end reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Engage society in the competitive provision of public services as the best way of enhancing their quality, while using the powers of government to ensure a universal minimum of provision. Insist on the high level of taxation required for the financing of such alternatives. What matters in the short term is the overall level of the tax rate and how it is spent. Later on it can be made more progressive through a steeply progressive tax on individual consumption. And above all take politics out of the shadow of money.
“This program fails to fit within the limits of the two major progressive traditions in American history. One tradition defends small scale property and small business. Another tradition seeks to regulate big business so that it not damage the public interest. It is no longer enough to protect small business or to regulate big business, or to attenuate economic inequalities through compulsory redistribution by taxation and transfer payments. We need to democratize the market, to renew its institutional arrangements so that more people can have more access to more markets in more ways so that they can stand on their own feet and make something of themselves. We cannot democratize the market economy unless we also deepen democracy.”
Instead Professor Unger argues that:
“[President Obama] has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight. He has used fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the absence of any consequential broadening of any economic and educational opportunity.”
This video should be viewed by everyone who really cares for the future of our country. While Professor Unger offers no specific policies or plans and never really defines the institutional arrangements necessary so that more people can have more access to productive capital property ownership, he definitely points us in the right thought direction.
The logical conclusion is that the key to broadening economic and educational opportunity is to first recognize that non-human productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Next is to pursue policies and programs in which the ownership of productive capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. 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, which includes their attainment of quality education.
When consumer earning power is systematically acquired in the course of the normal operations of the economy by people who need and want more consumer products and services, the production of products and services should rise to unprecedented levels; the quality and craftsmanship of products and services, freed of the cornercutting imposed by the chronic shortage of consumer purchasing power, should return to their former high levels; competition should be brisk; and the purchasing power of money should remain stable year after year.
Without this necessary balance hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites (that education creates) for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed and will continue to develop through technological innovation and invention into the future. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth.
If President Obama wants to truly be a leader then he needs to step up to the Presidential podium and really lead our nation. Time is of the essence!
