On the TPM blog, Pema Levy on May 16, 2012 writes:
“Mitt Romney just doesn’t get it. That’s the message Vice President Joe Biden drilled in to a crowd in eastern Ohio Wednesday, playing up his working-class roots.
“’They don’t get us. They don’t get who we are,’ Biden bellowed. ‘My mother and father dreamed as much as any rich guy dreams.’
“’Absolutely,’ a man in the audience volunteered.
“In a passionate speech at M7 Technologies, an advanced manufacturing facility in Youngstown, Biden used his own working-class roots — his family dealt with job losses and uncertainty, he said — to connect with a crowd in one of the most economically hard-hit areas in the country.
“Biden hit the basic points of the campaign’s economic message as well. Manufacturing is growing at its fastest rate since the 1990s, including 40,000 new manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Biden said. He contrasted that with examples of factories closing after they were acquired by Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney ran.”
Vice President Biden doesn’t get it either! The vast growth in manufacturing is capital intensive, not labor intensive, and this is an exponential growth function of the future economy.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, 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.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and 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. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by 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 workers) 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?”
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/05/biden-slams-romney-ohio-manufacturing.php
