Eight Ways To Reduce Global Inequality (Demo)

Extreme economic inequality is corrosive to our societies. It makes poverty reduction harder, hurts our economies, and drives conflict and violence. Reversing this trend presents a significant challenge, but one where we’ve seen some progress. Below we offer eight ways to move the world forward in reducing global inequality.

1. Stop Illicit Outflows

In developing countries, inadequate resourcing for health, education, sanitation, and investment in the poorest citizens drives extreme inequality. One reason is tax avoidance and other illicit outflows of cash. According toGlobal Financial Integrity, developing countries lost $6.6 trillion in illicit financial flows from 2003 through 2012, with illicit outflows increasing at an average rate of 9.4 percent per year. That’s $6.6 trillion that could reduce poverty and inequality through investments in human capital, infrastructure, and economic growth.

2. Progressive Income Tax

After falling for much of the 20^th century, inequality is worsening in rich countries today. The top one percent is not only capturing larger shares of national income, but tax rates on the highest incomes have also dropped. How much should the highest income earners be taxed? This is obviously a question to be decided domestically by citizens, and opinions differ. For instance, economist Tony Addison suggests a top rate of 65 percent rate on the top 1 percent of incomes.

3. A Global Wealth Tax?

In Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Thomas Piketty recommends an international agreement establishing a wealth tax. Under his plan, countries would agree to tax personal assets of all kinds at graduated rates. Theskeptics do have a point about whether this particular plan is practical, but we shouldn’t give up on the idea. Because wealth tends to accumulate over generations, fair and well-designed wealth taxes would go a long way towards combating extreme inequality.

4. Enforce a Living Wage

Governments should establish and enforce a national living wage, and corporations should also prioritize a living wage for their workers and with the suppliers, buyers, and others with whom they do business. Low and unlivable wages are a result of worker disempowerment and concentration of wealth at the top—hallmarks of unequal societies. As human beings with basic needs, all workers should earn enough to support themselves and their families. Governments and corporations should be responsible for protecting the right to a living wage, corporations should commit to responsible behavior that respects the dignity of all workers.

5. Workers’ Right to Organize

The right of workers to organize has always been a cornerstone of more equal societies, and should be prioritized and protected wherever this basic right is violated. Extreme inequality requires the disempowerment of workers. Therefore, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively for better pay and conditions is a global human rights priority. Despite Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights— which declares the right to organize as a fundamental human right—workers worldwide, including in the United States, still face intimidation, fear, and retribution for attempting to organize collectively. Where unions are strong, wages are higher and inequality is lower.

6. Stop Other Labor Abuses

Companies worldwide are also replacing what was once permanent and stable employment with temporary and contingent labor. Often called “contingent” or “precarious” workers, these workers fill a labor need that is permanent while being denied the status of employment. In the United States, this trend is called “misclassification,” in which employers misclassify workers as “independent contractors” when they are actually employees. Contingent labor also occurs through outsourcing, subcontracting, and use of employment agencies.

7. Open and Democratic Trade Policy

Negotiating international trade agreements behind closed doors with only bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists present has to end. These old-style trade agreements are fundamentally undemocratic and put corporate profits above workers, the environment, health, and the public interest. We need a new, transparent trade policy that is open, transparent, and accountable to the people.

8. A New Economics?

Economists are often imagined as stuffy academics who value arcane economic theory above humanitarian values. The field’s clinging to parsimonious theories gave us such winners as the Washington Consensus and a global financial system that imploded in 2008. Thankfully, there’s a movement among economics grad students and scholars to reimagine the discipline. As they acknowledge, we clearly need a new economics that works to improve the lives of everyone, not just those already well off. For instance, what could be more radical than a Buddhist economics? This is the path promoted by economist and Rhodes Scholar E .F. Schumacher, who says humanity needs an economics that creates wealth for all people, just not money for privileged people and corporations. Economics should take into account ethics and the environment, and treat its claims less like invariable truths.

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/03/02/eight-ways-to-reduce-global-inequality/

Those who are proposing these eight solutions are to be commended for what they have outlined. But they lack vision for what is necessary to transform the system that will result in inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice. A “global wealth tax” is the one proposed solution that they should reconsider.  This thinking is the result of being stuck, as in the entire playing field of advocates for change, in one-factor thinking––that is, the labor worker, and are oblivious to the most powerful and increasingly productive factor––non-human physical capital (the land, structures, tools, machines and robotics, computerization, etc.) that is responsible for 90 percent of the production of the products and services needed and wanted by society. Their focus should be on broadening personal ownership of capital asset formation simultaneously with financing the growth of the economy, instead of allowing the continued concentration of capital ownership.

What we really need leading up to and in the 2016 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new physical capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.

We need to stop attacking the “moneyed interests” as if private property is evil. It is not private property that is evil but the system that facilitates  concentrated ownership of productive capital property and enables the few to exclusively OWN the productive power of our corporations and regulate the vast majority to wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery.

We need to recognize 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, while ensuring that there is regulation that provides safety for workers and enhances the environment.

Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. 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.

What needs to be adjusted is 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 using insured, interest-free capital credit, and, as binary economist Louis 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 (the minority “moneyed interests”) and the undercapitalized” (the vast majority of government-dependent citizens).

We need to arrive at a new market economy structure in which on one level the employees of a corporation could walk into management and demand, in collective bargaining, the use of an justice-based managed full-voting, full-dividend-earnings-payout Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)—not just to trade a single block of stock for wage concessions, but to redesign the future of the company and its employees. We need, as a society, the assurance that as a corporate employer grows, it builds ownership into its employees. All of them as individuals, not collectively! When people are in a position to earn the income produced by their physical capital as well as the wages of their labor, their company is in a position to be more competitive through lower labor costs and increased technological invention and innovation, while achieving higher employee incomes through employee-owned productive capital.

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.

Still, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but 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 mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.

Virtually every conventional economist is a practitioner of the ideas of one-factor-mindset-shackled economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian model is widely taught. Keynes falsely presumed that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system––ignoring the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity. Kelso argued that the Keynesian model fails to recognize that “when capital workers [owners] replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.”

It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented by the 2016 presidential election 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 the two-factor 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 has never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.

The stark reality is that we are in a 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+ 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 worker 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 percenters will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive capital.

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 (the 99 percenters) 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 capitalists. 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 Just Third Way paradigm (http://cesj.org/learn/just-third-way/) beyond the greed model of monopoly, “hoggish” capitalism and the envy model of the traditional welfare state. This will promote peace, prosperity, and freedom through harmonious justice.

As my colleague Norman Kurland 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.” Kurland is President of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org).

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 enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.