On August 9, 2013, Sean McElwee writes on Salon.com:
The Republican Party has alienated many groups with its antics: women, blacks, Latinos, poor people, pensioners and young people, to name a few. However, it’s often agreed that they work for two groups: really rich people and entrepreneurs. These groups, they say, drive the economy, and bring the middle class along for the ride.
By exacerbating inequality, Republican policies destroy demand. One entrepreneur (a successful one, not an unnamed 20-year-old conservative college student) writes, in Bloomberg Businessweek: “My investment portfolio includes Pacific Coast Feather Co., one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of bed pillows. Like many other manufacturers, pillow-makers are struggling because of weak demand. The problem comes down to this: My annual earnings equal about 1,000 times the U.S. median wage, but I don’t consume 1,000 times more pillows than the average American. Even the richest among us only need one or two to rest their heads at night.”
This nails the problem. Businesses, whether small or large, or sole proprietors, partnerships, or business corporations are formed to provide products and services at a profit. Their success or failure is dependent on whether or not there are “customers with money.”
Unfortunately, politicians, economists and the media focus on JOB CREATION as the ONLY way to create “customers with money” and provide a source of income for peoples’ livelihood. Yet the demand for people (labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work) is being made less necessary as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. What should we conclude from this assessment of reality? Well, simply that if both labor and productive capital are interdependent factors of production, and if 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.
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.
What we really need is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of productive capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private productive capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new productive capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable income-producing capital estate.
If we are to significantly expand the population of “customers with money” and significantly grow the economy, then the ownership of productive capital must be spread more broadly and simultaneously with the growth, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent of the people who now own 50 to 90 percent of the wealth controlled by businesses. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/09/republicans_have_no_clue_how_businesses_work/
