This is an ABSOLUTE MUST VIEW 60 Minutes segment.
Rodney Brooks, founder of Rethink Robotics, tells Steve Kroft that using robots can help lower labor costs and keep manufacturing in the U.S., which will ultimately boost employment due to creating supply and distribution jobs, not manufacturing. This is a furtherance of the idea that workers create productivity and that worker productivity has dramatically risen, when the reality is that “machines” are the reason for productivity gains. Thus, the logical conclusion based on a society that respect private property rights is to OWN THE MACHINES. Otherwise, FUTURE productive capital “machine” investment will be own by the same CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP CLASS that now OWNS America.
We need to adopt and implement the Capital Homestead Act whereby tax deductibility of stock dividends would be imposed to remove the current double (sometimes triple) taxation on corporate profits and deter retained earnings and debt financing that continues to further concentrate productive capital ownership. FUTURE productive capital investment would be financed through the issuance and sale of new stock to company employees and non-employes who would pay back the acquisition loans out of the FUTURE earnings of the investment––just like the wealthy class does. The current elite wouldn’t be losing anything except a monopoly of ownership of wealth that doesn’t even exist yet. Their current accumulations would be left intact, to be taken care of by the natural limit on all wealth accumulation: death––at which time the recipient, not the estate, would be taxed to encourage spreading out the wealth rather than keeping it concentrated.
The subject is and will impact your future livelihood and that of your children and grandchildren! The program fails to point to the obvious solution, which is to connect EVERY American with ownership in the corporate productive capital assets represented by “robotics and digital computerized operations” and benefit from the income derived as Americans become the future “customers with money” to purchase the products and services that the “robotics and digital computerized operations” produce.
The master plan for this paradigm shift in the structure of the American economy can be accomplished with the adoption and implementation of the the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm andhttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
