On August 14, 2012, Neil Shah writes in The Wall Street Journal that according to a press release from Economists For Romney (which is not an official arm of the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign), over 400 economists have signed a statement in support of Romney’s “bold economic plan for America.”
Statement Of Support
We enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of economic freedom. The plan is based on proven principles: a more contained and less intrusive federal government, a greater reliance on the private sector, a broad expansion of opportunity without government favors for special interests, and respect for the rule of law including the decision-making authority of states and localities.
Applying these principles, Governor Romney would:
- Reduce marginal tax rates on business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment, jobs, and living standards.
- End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
- Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
- Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
- Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
- Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.
This is absolutely amazing! The result of the Romney/Ryan Economic Plan will be to propel further concentrated ownership of the future productive capital assets of the American economy among the 1 to 2 percent who now OWN America’s productive wealth. Nowhere is their a mention of support for broadening private, individual ownership of future income-producing productive capital assets. Instead it set the stage for robust laissez-faire investment economic policy that chains economic growth to the slavery of past savings.
Still, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.
Conventional economists have failed to recognize that when productive capital replaces labor workers as the major suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must own property rights in future productive capital assets.
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.
