Of course they are relative to the 1 percent who own America. In concentrated capital ownership terms, roughly 1 percent own 50 percent of the corporate wealth with 10 percent owning 90 percent. This leaves 90 percent of the people scrambling for the last 10 percent, with them dependent on their labor worker wages to purchase capital. Thus, we have the great bulk of the people providing a mere 10 percent or less of the productive input. Contrast that to the less than 5 percent who own all the productive capital providing 90 percent or more of the productive input, and who initiate and oversee most of the technological advances that replace labor work with capital work. As a result, the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes capital ever more productive. But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.
The problem is that fewer and fewer people, regardless of shrinking or expanding population growth, are participating in the industrial-technological shift to non-human means of producing products and services. Without private, individual ownership property rights in productive capital formation, the vast majority or 99 percent are left with securing a job to earn money. And the jobs are exponentially becoming scarcer and scarcer, particularly good paying jobs, which are generally skilled or specialized. “The United States got rich off of young workers” is a falicy. The rich got rich off of owning productive capital. Since the Industrial Revolution there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
The price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.
Binary economist Louis Kelso asserted: “The government continues to discharge its responsibility for the health and prosperity of the economy through coerced trickle-down; in other words, through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed.”
Such transfers from capital worker owners through coerced means to the non-working, under-employed, old and sick does not have to be “the necessary price of a wealthy modern society.”
In a democratic growth economy, based on Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. 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.
The problem is with the “system.” The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth. 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, or continue to face growing dependency on “welfare” in one form or another.
The problem is that fewer and fewer people, regardless of shrinking or expanding population growth, are participating in the industrial-technological shift to non-human means of producing products and services. Without private, individual ownership property rights in productive capital formation, the vast majority or 99 percent are left with securing a job to earn money. And the jobs are exponentially becoming scarcer and scarcer, particularly good paying jobs, which are generally skilled or specialized. “The United States got rich off of young workers” is a falicy. The rich got rich off of owning productive capital. Since the Industrial Revolution there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
The price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.
Binary economist Louis Kelso asserted: “The government continues to discharge its responsibility for the health and prosperity of the economy through coerced trickle-down; in other words, through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed.”
Such transfers from capital worker owners through coerced means to the non-working, under-employed, old and sick does not have to be “the necessary price of a wealthy modern society.”
In a democratic growth economy, based on Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. 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.
The problem is with the “system.” The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth. 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, or continue to face growing dependency on “welfare” in one form or another.
http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2012/03/27/creators_oped
