The premise to the Atlas Shrugged 20th Century Fox Blu-ray Disc movie presentations Part I and Part II is that individuals create value and are entitled to the private property rights (control) and the money exchange value of their property. It is best summed up in a segment of dialogue in Part II.
The character Francisco d’Anconia played by Esai Morales: “So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked yourself what is the root of money? Money is a tool that allows us to trade with one another––your goods for mine, your efforts for mine––the keystone of civilization. Having money is not the measure of the man. What matters is how he got it. If he produced it by creating value then his money is a token of honor. But if he’s taken it from those who produce, then there is no honor, and you are simply a looter.”
Cocktail party lady: “We all know that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak.”
A’Anconia: “What kind of strength are you talking about? The strength to create value or the ability to manipulate; to extort money in back room deals; to exercise pull. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another then men become the tools of men.”
This sounds honorable and is, that is if EVERY person has an equal opportunity to create value and benefit from the money exchange value of their property––their labor and their non-human property or capital. Productive capital wealth is defined as the non-human means of producing products and services (land; structures; infrastructure; tools; human-intelligent and non-human-intelligent machines; super-automation; robotics; digital computerized processing and operations; certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property, such as patents and trade or firm names; and the like owned by people.
There was a time in America when there was a pristine innocence as economic power diffusion existed in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth. Men with vision, entrepreneurial skill and drive created their success and accumulated productive capital wealth. The United States was founded on economic personalism––the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. It was a value system based on the importance and dignity of every human person. The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Our system has unjustly evolved and now requires reform in order to once again democratize economic power and return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion that the nation’s founders fought for and established.
In Atlas Shrugged, the emphasis is put on the individual without exposing the relationship of the ownership rights to the private property productive capital that is the non-human means of the production process. Author Ayn Rand’s advocacy subscribes to the right to the earnings that are produced by the enterprise owned by individuals. And that should be the guiding principle as the system is reformed. Private property rights of ALL citizens MUST be respected, honored, and protected.
What is not addressed in Atlas Shrugged is that the financial system is structured to facilitate the forming of narrowly ownership enterprises by a minuscule group of individuals who already OWN America. Thus, due to this rigged system, the ownership class who are already successful (whether inherited or created through innovation and invention and a bit of chance) maintain a hold on virtually ALL future enterprise and the ownership of productive capital formation. The masses are left ONLY to jobs, which due to continuous innovation and invention and tectonic shifts in the technologies of production controlled through ownership, are being destroyed and devalued, resulting in a decline in earning opportunity for a widening majority of people to support themselves and their families and contribute to societal development. Thus, the result is a steady economic decline because people have an ever-dwindling source of income or our wards of the state and cannot live their lives as productive “customers with money” to support what products and services are needed and wanted by society.
The government depicted in Atlas Shrugged has declared capitalism unworkable and in the name of the general welfare has seized private property rights. Private property rights are what America was founded on, and the story builds the case for upholding private property rights. The problem that is not addressed is that unless the financial system is reformed, the current system will reward the future of America to those relatively few who achieve success, whether honorably or unjustly. The story fails to address the solution, which facilitates the broaden ownership of FUTURE productive capital wealth among private citizens––every child, woman and man. And to facilitate this transformation without taking any of the existing property and rights away from those who already own. The story is at odds with this Just Third Way approach because it depicts a future struggle between the government and the elite thereby controlling rule of law, who have taken over the control of property rights and thus effective ownership, and the wealthy 1 percent who propagate the existing structure by which the future is owned by the same ownership class that owns today’s productive capital wealth.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
My colleague Norman Kurland at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) argues, “The haves represent a tiny fraction of humanity. Our ideas will split them between those who see our point and understand that they would benefit everyone without taking anything away from them during their lives, and those who want to keep ownership in an exclusive club. The latter cannot publicly attack the institution of private property without threatening the legal foundation that gives them their monopoly over the money system and the ownership system.”
We need leadership to awaken all American citizens to force the politicians to follow the people and lift all legal barriers to universal capital ownership access by every child, woman and man as a fundamental right of citizenship and the basis of personal liberty and empowerment. The goal should be to enable every child, woman and man to become an owner of ever-advancing labor-displacing technologies, new and sustainable energy systems, new rentable space, new enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.
The unworkability of the traditional market economy is evidenced by the diverse and growing deficits––federal budget deficit, trade deficit, city, county and state budget deficits––which are making it increasingly impossible for governments at every level to function. The increasing deficit burden is the result of the growing numbers of people who cannot earn, from legitimate participation in production, enough income to support themselves and their families. Thus government is obliged to “redistribute” to starve off economic collapse. The key means of redistribution is taxation––taking from the legitimate producers and giving to the non- or under-producers––to make up the economy’s ever wider income and purchasing power shortfalls.
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to become a capital worker as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income. This will empower and strengthen personalism and creativity.
Atlas Shrugged leads to the question that requires an answer. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797
See the Widescreen Review Blu-ray Disc review of Part I at http://www.widescreenreview.com/hddisc_detail.php?recid=13100 and Part II at http://www.widescreenreview.com/hddisc_detail.php?recid=13101
