On December 19, 2012, Ricardo Lopez writes in the Los Angeles Times that owners of restaurants and other businesses in San Diego County worry about the effect of possible automatic defense cuts on their livelihoods.
This story is related to our dependency on JOB CREATION through the military-industrial complex, which as the same time has bolstered concentrated ownership of the taxpayer-funded productive capital assets of private sector military contractors. The United States continues to build a military-dependent society based on propping-up the economy with taxpayer-supported jobs paid for from taxation and national debt.
Shouldn’t we instead be focusing economic growth on useful products and services that benefit people rather than on over-blown military expenditure? And at the same time creating an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY child, woman, and man is empowered to accumulate a viable income-producing productive capital estate as a primary source of income to replace jobs that are being destroyed and devalued by the constant march of technological innovation and invention. We will never be able to eliminate deficits and the national debt and build a FUTURE economy with significant growth rates of 10 percent annually until we address the issue of CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP and Who Should Own America.
America, and all industrial economies, is experience exponential tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, yet we continue to fail to zero in on the disruption to societies globally due to the resulting destruction of jobs and the devaluing of labor worker input. Growing the military/industrial complex is not the answer.
The issue of our time is CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of the non-human productive capital means of production and WHO SHOULD OWN AMERICA? Yet this is not being discussed by our political leaders, academia or the national media. 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.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people who own the productive capital and that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in revolution.
The solutions are stated in the Capital Homestead Act, which advocates broadening productive capital ownership simultaneously with the FUTURE growth of the economy (http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm).
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fiscal-cliff-san-diego-20121219,0,5560212.story
