Please RATE and SUBSCRIBE! For more information visit www.atlasnetwork.org/morality The free market needs and deserves a moral defense. The Atlas Network has…
Gary Reber Comments: Profit is a great motivator, but “Hoggism,” or capitalism based on greed is not what the result should be. Our leadership should focus on ensuring and empowering the 99 percent to participate in the ownership of future productive capital fo…rmation, using innovative insured credit mechanisms to finance their acquisition, simultaneously as the economy grows, without taking from the 1 percent, who now own all the productive capital providing 90 percent or more of the productive input.
Kathy Gornik Comments: The model you are suggesting seems good on the surface but does not work in reality. The vast majority of people do not want to own or operate a business. Capitalism works because those with talent, like Bill Gates, can get ridiculously wea…lthy while creating even far greater wealth for those who work for him, wealth for millions of people that would have never existed with Mr. Gates. And this is not to mention all the good his products and services did that trickled down to just about everyone in our society. So it’s incorrect to view the situation as you have stated it as if there is something wrong with Bill Gates’ wealth. One needs to also calculate the wealth he created that was distributed throughout our society. They tell a very different story about the incredible benefits, both moral and material, of Capitalism. And it’s all done without coercion or theft or interferences by government.
Gary Reber Comments: I have not nor do I advocate taking property rights away from those who already own productive capital assets, nor do I discredit the contributions of our inventors and leadership in technology. I, in fact, celebrate all such contributions but realize that the core function of technology is to do ever more of the work, which produces income from newly created wealth. People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Ownership in a political democracy does require taking responsibility and participating. Millions of Americans own stock via the stock exchanges and pension funds, but their capital estates are puny and do not support a viable dividend income stream. Yet they do not manage a business, which is left to professional managers and Boards of Directors. The biggest omission is not making the point that the system has erected major barriers supported by the political money channeled by those trying to preserve the current system of monopoly capitalism. The system assures that the 1 percent will continue to concentrate future ownership of productive capital formation among themselves. The system has highly effective barriers that can be found in our Federal tax system. the central banking and money system, the inheritance and gift tax laws and in the ways that corporations finance most of their growth capital and determine dividend payout policies in violation of traditional principles of private property. In other words, the system perpetuates monopolistic ownership, concentrated power over money and control over a top-down wage system and control over the trickle-down incomes channeled to the mis-educated 99 percent. From the time we are children we are taught that capitalistic materialism trumps all other systems. This is taught under the cloak of the rhetoric of “freedom” and “democracy” peddled by academics and the media who never mention that universal and equal access to “capital ownership” offers a legitimate and practical alternative means of achieving mass purchasing power in a world where technology and sophisticated management systems have displaced many forms of labor, and that true freedom and economic democracy are impossible under monopoly capitalism. This leaves the 99 percent of America and the world systematically shackled to a modern form of slavery. The greed of the haves, have-a-little’s and want-more’s enjoy the system that turns most citizens into wage slaves, welfare slaves, debt slaves, charity slaves, and tax slaves, who then turn to supporting “coercion or theft or interferences by government.” This coveted status of the haves and wanna-be haves to dominate and shape the dehumanizing lives of most persons and families is inherently unjust and undemocratic. If we cannot wake people up to the injustices built into the major laws and institutions of monopoly capitalism, political democracy will never work. Our challenge is find new bottom-up servant-teacher leaders who can teach have-nots the injustices of the present system and mobilize have-nots from left to right to engage in non-violent “people power” in support of broadening ownership of productive capital simultaneously with new capital formation investments in the American economy (without taking from those who already own). Such a systems solution needs to be based on a property and market-based version of economic democracy where even the haves will not lose their private property rights over their current monopolistic holding during their lives. We should all be productive and produce products and services in a way in which the current state of technology permits. Not only is your right to life denied if you don’t have effective access to the ownership of capital, your liberty is denied because without economic power your political power is useless. Thus, the national economic policy should be universal participation in the ownership of productive capital, alongside full employment of the labor workforce as a direct result. We need to teach and inspire future generations to embrace ownership participation and political democracy participation. As our fellow Americans become more prosperous through accumulating a viable capital estate, they will have the income means to consume the future product and service output of the economy, have greater opportunities for employment, and through that sense of security be able to positively contribute to society.
