Unknown: It always irritates me that the people who say “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime” are unwilling to give the man a fish AND, when it comes down to it, they’re unwilling to pay to teach him how to fish. What they’re really saying is “I don’t care if you starve, as long as I have a fish for myself.”
If both labor and productive capital are interdependent factors of production, and if productive capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all.
This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
We have the financial tools for democratizing productive capital ownership in a private property, market economy where most products are exponentially made by physical capital.
