This op-ed by Henry Blodget was published on April 10, 2013 by Business Insider:
One of the most disturbing trends in this country is the rise of extreme wealth and income inequality.
As the following charts show, America is rapidly becoming a country of a few million overlords and three hundred million serfs.
Unfortunately, this issue has been politicized, which means that people don’t think about the implications of it — they just start yelling.
But extreme inequality is bad for everyone, even the overlords.
Why?
Because when inequality gets bad enough, serfs don’t have much money to buy products from overlords. This hurts the overlords’ ability to get even richer.
(That’s what’s wrong with the American economy right now. The serfs are tapped out. The overlords are responding by firing more serfs, to increase profits. Unfortunately, because one person’s “costs” are another person’s “wages,” this is making the problem worse.)
The best way to fix inequality is not to tax most of the overlords’ money and give it to the serfs. That just inflames “class warfare” and gets people yelling about “socialism.”
The best way to fix inequality is to persuade the overlords that it is in their best interests to share more of their wealth by paying their employees more for their hard work (work that, not incidentally, is what makes the overlords rich).
The analysis is correct, except for the WHY that does not address CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets among the wealth minority, but the solution is WRONG! The solution suggested relies on paying labor workers more for their “hard word.” This flies in the face of the reality that increasingly less human labor is needed to produce the products and services society needs and wants. As a result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production jobs are being destroyed and the worth of labor is being devalued, as increasingly the non-human factor of production is responsible for the output of the products and services. So to pay more for fundamentally less work is problematic.
Instead, we must change the rules and reform the system to facilitate financing economic growth with “FUTURE SAVINGS,” and simultaneously create new capitalist owners of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets. “FUTURE SAVINGS” are profits used to repay loans for new capital formation and acquisition of existing productive assets by new owners.
This is the ONLY way to avoid socialism and to head off more personal and family economic turmoil and social unrest and upheaval due to a faulty economic system that fosters the concentration of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital––the ownership of non-human productive assets such as land, structures, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. The system is faulty because economic growth is based on individual and family accumulations of savings, with ALL economic growth dependent on past savings “invested” to further concentrated productive capital ownership. This will leave the vast majority, or the so-called 99 percent, who are property-less as related to ownership of productive capital assets, unable to save sufficiently and instead struggling to sustain their livelihood month to month, as they fear for job loss and having to rely on taxpayer-supported government welfare.
For solutions see “Financing Economic Growth With “FUTURE SAVINGS”: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement 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
