On April 26, 2013, Richard A. Haass writed in The Washington Post:
There is nothing inevitable, however, about American sway over this young century. The advantages this country enjoys are neither permanent nor sufficient to ensure continued primacy.
So, what needs doing? A partial list includes fixing broken public schools, repairing or replacing aged infrastructure, modernizing immigration policy, reforming health care, negotiating new trade accords, lowering corporate taxes, reining in spending on entitlements, and reducing debt as a share of GDP. Abroad, it includes resisting wars of choice where the interests at stake are less than vital and where there are alternatives to the use of force. This would also mean accepting that we cannot remake other societies in our image.
What stands in the way of the next American century is American politics. To paraphrase Walter Kelly’s Pogo, we have met the problem, and we are it. Special interests often crowd out the general national interest. Partisanship can be healthy, but not when it leads to an inability to govern and to make difficult choices.
In order to build a prosperous “Second American Century,” it is essential that people focus their thinking on the understanding of who and what creates wealth, in order to fully understand how to solve growing income inequality and the disintegration of the nation wherein the majority of citizens are regulated to low-pay job serfdom and public welfare.
The required new thinking must respect property rights, and the right of all citizens to acquire private and individual ownership of wealth-creating productive capital assets. This is the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice––the ONLY path that will assure democratic and free market conditions.
The reality is that while increasingly productive capital growth is the means to achieving general affluence for all citizens, the practical opportunity to acquire productive capital is not accessible to everyone. The vast majority of citizens are unnecessarily excluded from effective participation in the property rights and earnings of productive capital assets. This is not to say that the opportunity to acquire productive capital does not exist, but that the opportunity is unnecessarily denied to the middle class and poor (the savings-poor capital-less and under-capitalized) and effectively limited to the few who are already well-capitalized and thereby wealthy. Even though the wealthy ownership class represents less than 10 percent of the population with the very rich representing 1 percent or less of the population, they all use the potent financial mechanism of capital credit to acquire productive capital assets, with virtually all assets acquired using the earnings of the productive capital to pay for their acquisition. Through this financial mechanism the rich effectively acquire more riches through the process of acquiring capital productiveness with the earnings of production.
In the meantime, while the economy’s technical prowess is capable of producing the products and services needed and wanted by ALL people, the poor and middle class are unable to realize their needs and wants no matter how hard they work, because they cannot earn enough through a job to consume what the economy can produce.
While ALL citizens have the right to earn an income through participating in production, ONLY a few are privileged to effectively participate in production beyond their own labor to include their wealth-creating productive capital assets.
When the right to participate in production through productive capital ownership is effectively denied, especially when tectonic shifts in the technologies of production destroy and degrade the worth of jobs, then the people affected become increasingly insecure in satisfying their and their family’s basic survival. Such conditions force them to seek low-pay, low-security jobs, or either charity or welfare, or desperately engage in illegitimate means. Such disintegration tears at society’s sense of fairness and justice, and spreads resentment, alienation and despair.
The solution should be obvious––that is to eliminate what amounts to an effective monopoly on productive capital acquisition. This will unleash the economy’s full potential to harness and employ wealth-producing productive capital assets broadly owned by ALL Americans, while respecting the full property rights of all and without taking anything from the wealthy who now OWN America. The effect would be to democratize both political power and economic power.
The solution is to employ capital credit mechanisms to facilitate the productive capital acquisition by EVERY citizen, whether poor or in the middle class, to fuel a larger and more affluent economy. This can be facilitated on the basis of self-finance, whereby the productive capital assets, after returning its acquisition costs, begin to pay a fully-distributed capital earnings dividend to its new owners, thus initially supplementing their labor income and reducing their taxpayer-supported welfare dependence, and over time building income to replace their dependency on job earnings and secure their retirement as they age.
This new paradigm is the subject of the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797 and is founded on the concept of Monetary Justice (http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice).
A Petition to reform the Federal Reserve to provide capital credit to ALL Americans can be supported at http://signon.org/sign/amend-the-federal-reserve.fb27?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687. The proposed Capital Homestead Act (http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm) would accomplish the necessary reforms.
