On May 10, 2019, Lance Chambers writes on Quora:
It will slow Chinas’ rise for a little while but not reverse it. China has too much momentum and its growth rate is far higher than Americas. Also, China will shrug of any tariff and trade issues it might have with America as they increase sales with other nations. The US accounts for just under 20% of all of Chinas exports and although losing all that, if the US could wean itself of 100% of Chinese imports, would sting but it wouldn’t stop Chinas growth.
America delayed too long to address what has now become an existential danger to Americas position as Nos. 1. The US, like many nations believed that China was ill-educated, uncivilised, badly led, surrounded by enemies, etc. Today, it is very obvious that we got it all completely wrong. But it’s too late and China will, in the not too distant future be the largest trading nation the world has ever seen, the richest, the most advanced in any and all fields of science, and will have the largest domestic market on the planet. If China stopped trade with any and all other nations its domestic market would still make it the country with the largest GDP and would be enough to make it the richest country in the world — but it won’t do that as they want to progress even further and faster than anyone could have imagined.
I am really looking forward to seeing how the world changes between now and when l finally shake off this mortal coil. It’s going to be an exciting ride.
Trumps end goal is to stop China from continuing to grow or at least to slow it down as much as he can. This is because China is a very real threat to Americas dominance but China cannot be stopped.
Gary Reber Comments:
No, China, ruled by a totalitarian government by the Communist Party, cannot be stopped, only slowed, as long as for-profit corporations continue to move to contract with China’s manufacturers to realize lower production costs, and consumers continue to support them by consuming their products.
But we do not need the Chinese or any other slave-wage labor country, nor do they need us. We, and other Western countries only need slave-wage labor countries to manufacture supply chain parts and finished products as long as citizens are willing to gut their own manufacturing capabilities and support the Chinese and other countries instead.
We need to implement not only strong tariffs to protect domestic industries, and to remedy trade distortions (punitive function) but other policies to re-start investment in our own country to build the technologically advanced automation and “machine” engines to produce quality products and services that our citizens will be able to afford to purchase and that other world citizens will desire for their own consumption.
There is no way we can compete with slave-wage labor countries as long as the products manufactured are slave-wage labor dependent, which puts pressure on our own labor force to significantly lower their expectations for wages and salaries, and devalue the worth of labor.
We must instead create efficiencies in production by employing technologies of production that are non-human intensive and energize the ever-accelerating shift to productive capital, as the principle means of manufacturing, and 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 and innovation.
But to be successful, we must ensure that EVERY child, woman and man becomes a full owner in this technological revolution in which productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth, and make sure that this source of income is owned by EVERY citizen, not collectively but individually.
This is why it is critical that we finance the formation of advanced manufacturing growth and renewal using financing mechanism that do not require past savings, and thus are not dependent on the rich, already wealthy capital asset ownership class. This can be accomplished using insured, interest-free capital credit, solely repayable with the full, pre-tax earnings of the investments in building a future economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
Significantly though, no matter how much labor is necessary or unnecessary, it is imperative that the issue of concentrated capital ownership is addressed, and policies are enacted to simultaneously create new capital owners of the corporations growing the economy, both established and viable start-ups, as the economy grows.
In such a democratic growth economy, the ownership of productive capital assets 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 existing corporate capital asset 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, benefiting EVERY citizen (children, women and men), including the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. EVERY citizen would become a full-voting capital asset owner in the corporations growing the economy, effectively enabling operating decisions to be made from the bottom up, eliminating the lopsided distribution of profits, and creating democratic control. Thus, productive capital income, from full corporate earnings dividend payouts, would be distributed more broadly and the demand for goods, products, and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand for quality goods, products and services, which will promote and support environmentally responsible economic growth and more profitable and responsible enterprise. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more “green,” environmentally productive and enhanced productive capacity to service the demands of an environmentally responsible growth economy. As a result, our business corporations would be enabled to operate more efficiency and competitively, while broadening wealth-creating, income-producing capital ownership participation, creating new capital owners and jobs resulting from the growth spiral, and “customers with money” to support the goods, products, and services being produced.
The two prerequisites to achieve this goal are political power, which is the power to make, interpret, administer, and enforce laws, and economic power, the power to produce goods, products and services, whether through labor power or productive capital.
The essence of economic democracy lies in the elimination of differences of earning power resulting from denial of equality of economic opportunity, particularly equal access to capital credit. Differences of economic status resulting from differences in advantages taken and uses made of differences based on inequality of economic opportunity, particularly those that give access to capital credit to the already capitalized and deny it to the non- or under-capitalized, are flagrant violations of the constitutional rights of citizens in a democracy. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor — the equivalency of mass murder — the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
We cannot balance the budget without cutting out coerced taxpayer-dependent redistribution of the earnings of capital owners contributing their “tools,” which if we did at this juncture would collapse the economy and ruin lives, resulting in social strife, personal suffering and degradation, the erosion of freedom, and ultimately anarchy, which will bring on totalitarian government. While welfare, private charity, boondoggle employment and other redistribution measures are now seen as necessary, they do not have to be sustained indefinitely. There are policies that can be adopted and executed to reverse the ultimate direction of collapse of the American market-economy system. Such policies are based on the recognition that as the production of goods, products and services changes from labor intensive to capital intensive, the way in which every human being — not just a few, but EVERY person — earns his or her income must change in the same way. At the core of this quiet revolution is the understanding and commitment to broadening the ownership of productive capital simultaneously with the responsible growth of economy.
We need to reevaluate our tax, monetary and central banking institutions, as well as, labor and welfare laws. We need to innovate in such ways that we lower the barriers to equal economic opportunity and create a level playing field based on anti-monopoly and anti-greed fairness and balance between production and consumption. In so doing, EVERY citizen can begin to accumulate a viable capital estate without having to take away from those who now own by using the tax system to redistribute the income of capital owners. What the “haves” do lose is their capital ownership monopoly, which they enjoy under the present unjust system they have created. A key descriptor of such innovation is to find the ways in which “have nots” can become “haves” without taking from the “haves.” Thus, the reform of the “system,” as binary economist and author Louis Kelso postulated, “must be structured so that eventually all citizens produce an expanding proportion of their income through their privately owned productive capital and simultaneously generate enough purchasing power to consume the economy’s output.”
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be our focus is to adjust the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The government should acknowledge its obligation to make productive capital ownership economically purchasable by capital-less Americans (the 99 percent) using insured, interest-free capital credit, and, as Kelso stated, “substantially assume financial responsibility for the economy through establishing and supervising the implementation of an economic, labor and business policy of democratized economic power.” Historically, capital has been the primary engine of industrialization. But as used, as Kelso has argued, has, as well, “been the chief cause of the institutional deformities that have created and maintained two incompatible classes: the overcapitalized and the undercapitalized.”
Once this goal becomes the national political focus we will see an unbelievable discussion of workable plans to realize the goal. Remember that planning begins with a vision and a goal. This is not rocket science but it does require national leadership. Implementation requires amending a few laws that basically authorize the transactions that will broaden capital ownership paid for with the future earnings of capital investment. Allowing such transactions will provide incentives for profitable opportunities to employ unused capacity and promote stable and robust economic growth that protects and enhances the Earth, our home.
Sadly though, after more than a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that can restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new. Though relatively obscure, it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been miseducated and misled by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics. This will require a personal commitment to acquiring this knowledge and thinking in new ways, followed by political action.
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented in presidential and congressional elections to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject.
One of my favorite Kelso quotes is: “The low credibility of government and of all lesser institutions in America today is a consequence of our own increasingly hollow democracy. It is reflected in the rising domestic crime rate and the social and political alienation of people in all walks of life, except for the rich and their sycophants. The real collapse of American ideological leadership in the world can best be seen in the feebleness and confusion that characterizes American foreign policy. The handwriting on the wall is clear: America must rethink the meaning of democracy and set about within its borders to rationalize its economic policy into one that synchronizes the shift from labor intensive to capital intensive production, with universal capital ownership and the payment of the full wages [earnings] of capital to capital owners, so to restore economic democracy to our economy. We should democratize our plutocratic capitalist economy before we preach democracy to others.”
At one point in 1976, the discussion led to The Joint Economic Committee of Congress endorsing a policy to broaden capital ownership as an economic goal for America. The 1976 Joint Economic Report stated: “To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. Congress also should request from the Administration a quadrennial report on the ownership of wealth in this country, which would assist in evaluating how successfully the base of wealth was being broadened over time.”
Unfortunately the Congress and no past or present President have never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.
Instead, the American people have been promised that if the wealthy ownership class could gain even more earnings through low taxes and deregulation, the savings would be reinvested to grow the economy and create more and better jobs and higher wages. The focus has always been on job creation and wage growth, while the rich get richer by invisibly accumulating more capital asset ownership. Of course, there is always some truth to the idea that new jobs will be created through reinvestment, but jobs are eliminated as well, as the reinvestment is increasingly directed to the formation of new, highly-efficient non-human technological means of production, requiring far less workers and/or to extensions to other countries with lower labor costs and no or few regulations. Americans should be smarter and realize that this is an underhanded scheme for the already wealthy and their heirs to OWN America and further concentrate and monopolize ownership of ALL productive capital, present and future. Such “trickle-down” thinking does not work. As a result of such unworkable policies, fewer and fewer people remain good “customers with money” to buy what the economy is capable of producing. And even then, as consumers, the vast majority of Americans have gone into consumption debt in order to provide for themselves and their families. Americans increasingly do not feel secure and are being challenged as to how to survive, faced with mounting over-extended consumer credit as well as less and less job security to earn sufficient income to pay off their debt. Unnecessarily, millions of Americans are faced with losing their savings and homes, and their jobs — and their dreams for a better life — with no way to earn through owning the wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital now formed and that which will be formed in the future.
As history has confirmed, better earnings and better job prospects did not and will not trickle down by lowering taxes on the wealthy and the corporations they own or deregulating the rules of responsible production. Responsibly growing the economy simultaneously with creating new capital owners, and thus “customers with money,” is the ONLY way to achieve inclusive prosperity and economic justice.
The stark reality is that we are in a self-imposed depression reflected in rising “real” (not statistical) unemployment and underemployment and instability that we will never escape from until we change our economic policy. Increasingly, more Americans will not be able to ever purchase a home, due to the packed inflationary wage and welfare base factored into the cost of building homes, which inflate prices, and will be forced to rent their entire life or depend on government living assistance — not able to accumulate equity that can help to sustain them in their retirement years. And this is the new reality now facing people in the middle class. The uncertainty of holding onto a good job is frightening to an increasingly wider base of middle-class working citizens. When you factor in the average non-salaried worker, even with a government-mandated minimum labor wage rate of $10.00 to $15.00 per hour in some states and cities, the outcome is grim. Never mind that consumer demand continues to dwindle because of insufficient income, solely tied to labor worker wages. The impact of the decline in consumer demand due to declining labor worker wages is that production will decline or desist without sustainable consumer demand. Furthermore, those corporations growing the economy, both nationally and globally, will expand globally with investment in new productive capital projects and seek “customers with money” abroad.
This is all coming about because we have severely mismatched the power to produce with the possession of unsatisfied needs and wants. Those capital owners who have unsatisfied needs and wants have ready access through conventional finance to get as much or more productive capital as they want. Our tax laws are designed to further benefit the 1 percent by providing enormous write-offs and credits to producers (corporations) who are owned by the few, who already produce more than they can consume. Those who have only their labor power and its precarious value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital “workers” as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs and wants. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percent will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by non-human productive capital (“machines” of all description).
But if we change direction and systematically build earning power into consumers, we have the opportunity to reverse the depression perpetrated by systematically limiting the 99 percent to labor wages alone and through technology eliminating their jobs. We need solutions to grow the economy in ways that create productive jobs and widespread equity sharing. We need to systematically make insured, interest-free capital credit to purchase capital accessible to economically underpowered people in which the income from the capital investment is isolated until it pays for itself, and then begins to produce a stream of dividend income to the new capital owners. This can only be accomplished by enabling every person to have access to capital ownership and purchase the capital, and pay for it out of what the capital produces. It’s time good and well-intentioned people woke up and adopted a JUSTThird WAY paradigm (http://cesj.org/learn/just-third-way/) beyond the greed model of monopoly, “hogist” capitalism and the envy model of the traditional welfare state. This will promote peace, prosperity, and freedom through harmonious justice.
My colleague, Norman Kurland, at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) argues, “The haves represent a tiny fraction of humanity. Our ideas will split them between those who see our point and understand that they would benefit everyone without taking anything away from them during their lives, and those who want to keep ownership in an exclusive club. The latter cannot publicly attack the institution of private property without threatening the legal foundation that gives them their monopoly over the money system and the ownership system.”
We need leadership to awaken all American citizens to force the politicians to follow the people and lift all legal barriers to universal capital ownership access by every child, woman, and man as a fundamental right of citizenship and the basis of personal liberty and empowerment. The goal should be to enable every child, woman, and man to become an owner of ever-advancing labor-displacing technologies, new and sustainable energy systems, new rentable space, new viable enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.
The emphasis on the systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to slave-wage labor countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth (with past savings requirements) that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
The unworkability of the traditional market economy is evidenced by the diverse and growing deficits — federal budget deficit, trade deficit, city, county and state budget deficits — which are making it increasingly impossible for governments at every level to function. The increasing deficit burden is the result of the growing numbers of people who cannot earn, from legitimate participation in production, enough income to support themselves and their families. Thus, government is obliged to “redistribute” to starve off economic collapse. The key means of redistribution is taxation — taking from the legitimate producers and giving to the non- or under-producers — to make up the economy’s ever-wider income and purchasing power shortfalls.
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to contribute productively to the economy as a capital owner as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.
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 capital ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and capital ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through concentrated ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percent 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 owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” 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?”
For clarity on this concept that transcends both capitalism and socialism by combining free markets with the democratization of economic power and capital ownership, please see the 28-minute video of CBS’ Mike Wallace’s interview with Mortimer Adler (http://www.hrc. utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/adler_mortimer.html) and Mike Wallace’s interview with Louis Kelso and Senator Russell Long (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odDGX8q2o3I).
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the enactment of the proposed Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/. And The Capital Homestead Act brochure, pdf print version at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/C-CHAflyer_1018101.pdf and Capital Homestead Accounts (CHAs) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/capital-homestead-accounts-chas/
