On March 3, 2013, Jason D. Schwartz writes in The New York Times:
With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.
That gulf helps explain why stock markets are thriving even as the economy is barely growing and unemployment remains stubbornly high.
With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while productivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.
The result has been a golden age for corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are also benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India.
Jason Schwartz is another conventional thinker who does not see or understand the implications of his own words: “…productivity gains allow [companies] to increase sales without adding workers.”
This is because companies will continue to seek the most efficient means to produce the products and services they offer, and invest in the non-human factor of production. My mentor, binary economist Louis Kelso, is quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
In a competitive race to produce efficiently, in addition to a focus on productive capital investment, employers are either shortening the workweek or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. The only work that has increased is part-time work, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.
The problem is that technological unemployment will become the norm globally and companies will not be able to find “customers with money” to purchase their products and services. Obviously, because for the vast majority of people a JOB is their ONLY means of an income source. The financial system is rigged to benefit those who already own and to perpetuate further CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of productive capital productivity gains. We need to reform the system to free economic growth from the slavery of “past” savings.
The solution is to reform the financial system to incentivize companies to finance their growth through the issuance and sale of new stock, with full voting and full profit dividend payout provisions, so that EVERY American can acquire the stock using insured pure capital credit and pay for their acquisition out of the “future” earnings of the investment.
Essentially, the pressing need is for everyone in a position of influence to raise the consciousness of the America people by making the nation’s NUMBER ONE focus the introduction of a National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream of property ownership as a primary source of personal wealth.
This is the solution to America’s economic decline in wealth and income inequality, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
