How To Really Protect And Advance America (Demo)

Gary Reber

Donald Trump has advocated for re-establishing tariffs on imported goods and products. But much, much more has to be accomplished.

Ever since Ronald Reagan, our political leaders have abandoned protectionism, which has resulted in the reality that products manufactured in America today heavily rely on suppliers from other countries. We have become dependent on foreign suppliers who could cut us off anytime they choose.

While Americans routinely patronize the lowest price retailers, such as Walmart, and constantly seek the lowest competitive price on products, obsessively using credit card debt to pay for the products they sell, much of the gross revenue generated goes to China, Mexico, Vietnam and other low-wage, regulation-relaxed nations, as these products are being produced there instead of in America. And under so called international “free trade” agreements, further out-sourcing of product manufacturing results as foreign-produced goods and products can dominate. This is the cause of our huge annual trade deficits. Americans get cheap goods and products and foreigners get our money,  with Americans perpetually indebted to credit card corporations.

And as foreigners get richer they purchase our industrial resources, factories, retail establishments, commercial buildings, and increasingly residential real estate. They are essentially colonizing America as foreign buyers become our new landlords.

In years prior to 1981, our leaders saw to it that we had strong tariffs in place. As a result, virtually a quarter of our workforce was both engaged in manufacturing and unionized. We produced quality goods and products, which other countries imported. We were the largest creditor nation. But today’s reality is very different. It is no surprise that the most indebted country in the world is the United States, meaning the value of our domestically owned assets is less than our liabilities to foreign investors.

This has come about because of a transformation to “free trade,” which benefits the wealthy capital ownership class who own the corporations who now operate multi-nationally. As with any business, they strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners. They strive to minimize marginal costs, the cost of producing an additional unit of a good, product or service once a business has its fixed costs in place, in order to stay competitive with other companies racing to stay competitive through technological innovation. Reducing marginal costs enables businesses to increase profits, offer goods, products and services at a lower price (which people as consumers seek), or both. Increasingly, new technologies are enabling companies to achieve near-zero cost growth without having to hire people. Thus, private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.

The result is that the price of products and services are extremely competitive as consumers will always seek the lowest cost/quality/performance alternative, and thus for-profit business corporations are constantly competing with each other (on a local, national and global scale) for attracting “customers with money” to purchase their products or services. Multi-national in scope, they seek “customers with money” wherever they are in the world.

While prior to 1981 (before the Reagan administration gained political power), the United States was the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods and products, and the world’s largest importer of the raw materials necessary to craft them.

Ever since the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the opposite is true. We have abandoned century-old successes upon which we built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen. Now we are the largest importer of finished goods and products and among the largest exporters of all manner of raw materials (iron ore, oil, coal, timber, et cetera) that are then used to manufacturer in other countries the goods and products we import back for American consumers to purchase.

Today, the wealthy capital ownership class is not pledged to an “America First” development philosophy and practice. Instead, competitive forces have caused them to exit domestic production at alarming rates.

This shift to global outsourcing of manufacturing and fabrication has been a steady transition for decades now, but most intensified during the past three decades. To restore the brand “Made In America” and resume the manufacture of goods and consumer products in the United States will be a huge, but necessary challenge in the immediate years ahead.  But this necessary challenge must be pursued because we must protect our industries from cheap foreign labor, lax foreign regulations and foreign subsidies, making it uncompetitive to produce in the United States. This is not only about cheap foreign labor competition but also about technological invention and innovation, which is constantly destroying the necessity for workers. With the profits generated by Americans buying foreign-made goods and products, other countries are investing in advanced technologies, which will enable their home companies to become even more competitive.

The point that has to be the primary driver is that, as much as possible, the rare earth metals and other raw material, and the fabricated components that go into any good or product need to be sourced within the United States, as well as the multitude of machines necessary to the fabrication of goods and products. As such, this will ensure that the maximum jobs necessary are performed by Americans. Our products also need to be “created in the mind” by Americans, which to a large degree already are leading the world. But this “creation” edge is rapidly shifting to other developing countries as they gain the monetary resources to invest in technological development.

We need to incentivize the manufacture and fabrication in the United States of every component aspect that comprises American products. This is not a click-of-the-switch transformation, but a process that will take years, likely decades, to fully mature. It will require new investment in manufacturing and fabrication in the United States, and this new investment must be financed using financial mechanisms that empower not only employees owning the corporations that employ them and which are growing the economy, but as well EVERY child, woman and man, all with an equal opportunity to become individual owners in this future powerhouse American economy.

This is necessary to build mass consumption power into Americans who are supposed to be consuming all the newly created goods, products and services. This necessity should be obvious to all political leaders, economists and academia, in order for workers and citizens to be able to purchase the “machinery” (non-human means of production) that is taking away their ability to produce. Otherwise, technological invention and innovation in manufacturing and fabrication, will continue to be owned by the tiny few who now own the non-human means of production throughout the world. The economy will never be able to attain its production capability as we will not be available to balance production and consumption, and the masses of Americans will be deprived of ever attaining an affluent life experience, that the 1 percent wealthy capital owners now enjoy.

We must always be thinking in policy terms as to how we can simultaneously grow the economy and create new capital owners, without the requirement of past savings, which only the existing wealthy ownership class has. Otherwise, the wealthy corporate owners of the “machines” will continue to not be able to consume anywhere near what they produce and will accumulate more and more capital wealth, and the owners of labor (people) will not be able to produce anywhere near what they consume.

The only rational way to balance production and consumption is to ensure, as much as we can, that every producer can consume what he or she produces, and every consumer can produce what he or she consumes. In economics, that’s Say’s Law of Markets.

We critically need to be thinking about how to build mass consumption power into the people in the markets who are supposed to be consuming the goods, products and services.

Here are some thoughts on specifics necessary to return the United States to the status of the greatest industrial powerhouse in the world.

Tariffs

The government should impose robust import levies and tariffs (tax) on particular classes of imports that are determined to be manufactured outside the United States and exported back to the United States that do not qualify as true “Fair Trade” and unfairly undercut an American-make equivalent. At present, American business corporations are increasingly abandoning the United States and its communities to invest in productive capital formation outside the United States, particularly in China, Mexico, India, and other parts of Asia, supported by American consumers who cannot afford pricier American-made products. As a result, America is experiencing a period of deindustrialization that is putting America in decline.

This has forced policy makers to adopt a redistributive socialist solution rather than a universal capital ownership one whereby economic growth of the earning power of the citizens would flourish simultaneously with new, broadly-owned productive capital formation investments in the United States. Such overseas operations have the advantage of “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations – which translate to lower-cost production. Thus, producing the same product or service in the United States would be far more expensive. For most people, economic globalization means a growing gap between rich and poor, technological alienation of the labor worker from the means of production, and the phenomenon of global corporations and strategic alliances forcing labor workers in high-cost wage markets, such as the United States, to compete with labor-saving capital tools and lower-paid foreign workers. Unemployment is high and there is an accelerating displacement of labor workers by technology and cheaper foreign labor, resulting in greater economic uncertainty and unstable retirement incomes for the average American citizen– causing the average citizen to become increasingly dependent on government wealth redistribution programs.

We need a policy change, which assures truly “Fair Trade” and that exponentially reduces the exodus of our manufacturing prowess and invigorates America’s entrepreneurial exceptionalism and competitive spirit to create products and services in the spirit of “the best that they can be.” We need policies that will de-incentivize American multinational corporations and others from undercutting “American Made,” while simultaneously competitively lowering the cost of production through expanded capital worker ownership in more efficient technological invention and innovation. At present, the various incentives in place do not broaden capital ownership but instead further concentrate ownership.

Ownership Unions

The labor union movement should transform to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for this new democratic capitalism. They should play the part that they have always aspired to – that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.

Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics – the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions. Binary economist Louis Kelso stated: “The myth of the ‘rising productivity’ of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.”

Kelso argued that unions “must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the goods and services are produced by capital input, then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as wages of their capital and the remainder as wages of their labor work…If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both…The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.”

Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real Kelso-designed Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital worker income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be capital workers receiving income from their capital ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.

The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today – wages, hours, and working conditions – and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.

If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that products and services are actually produced.

When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.

Kelso stated, “Working conditions for the labor force have, of course, improved over the years. But the economic quality of life for the majority of Americans has trailed far behind the technical capabilities of the economy to produce creature comforts, and even further behind the desires of consumers to live economically better lives. The missing link is that most of those un-produced goods and services can be produced only through capital, and the people who need them have no opportunity to earn income from capital ownership.”

Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, expressed his open-mindedness to the goal of democratic worker ownership in his 1967 testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as a strategy for saving manufacturing jobs in America from being outcompeted by Japan and eventual outsourcing to other Asian countries with far lower wage costs: “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth, which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.

“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact on costs and prices.”

Unfortunately for democratic unionism, the United Auto Workers, American manufacturing workers, and American citizens generally, Reuther was killed in an airplane crash in 1970 before his idea was implemented. Leonard Woodcock, his successor, nor any subsequent union leader never followed through.

Re-Invigorate The 1933 Buy American Act

The Buy American Act, officially a law in affect but not practiced, states that anything purchased by any federal agency had to be manufactured by and sourced to an American supplier. We need to repeal the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which gives the President power to authorize “waivers” to government agencies that want to buy anything from furniture to computers to military ammunition from foreign manufacturers. Government procurement should always be to purchase “Made In America” goods and products.

Government Contract Stipulations

Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation entitled the Outsourcing Prevention Act. This would impose an outsourcing tax of either 35 percent of a corporation’s profits or an amount equal to its total savings from outsourcing the jobs. Sanders aims to prevent companies from moving to foreign countries by withholding federal contracts, tax breaks, loans or grants from corporations that move more than 50 jobs overseas. However this is couched only in terms of protecting jobs. If Sanders can introduce legislation that withholds federal government contracts to corporations who outsource operations to other countries, then Sanders can and should introduce legislation that requires EVERY corporation who is awarded a federal government contract for domestic infrastructure work or other contractural purposes to be employee-owned. We desperately need to move to a future in which EVERY child, woman and man becomes a substantial individual owner of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy.

Subsidies

We should eliminate all  tax loopholes and the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies to corporations.

If we do entertain any subsidies, these should be redirected toward environmentally supportive alternative energy production and energy storage to enable our country to become energy independent and provide a heathy environment for our people and our wildlife, while enhancing the beautification of the natural environment. And those corporations benefiting from such subsidies should be required to be employee-owned.

Tax Reform

Recommended tax reforms are as follows:

1. Personal earned incomes and property-derived incomes

The tax rate should be a single rate for all incomes of natural persons from all sources above a personal exemption level so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt. The poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes (which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes). Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs.

Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.

2. Inheritance and estate taxes

As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax should be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes; teachers; health workers; police; other public servants; military veterans; artists; the poor; and the disabled.

Each year tens of billions of dollars in wealth-creating productive capital assets are passed along to heirs under current tax laws, ensuring that the capital ownership concentration will continue. The revenues generated from inheritance taxes should be pledged to support the Social Security program, thus achieving a reduction in Social Security taxes, which are becoming a tax burden as their are fewer good-paying jobs, more part-time workers, and exponentially fewer jobs overall.

3. Corporations and business taxes for non-small business enterprises

4. Investment credit tax incentives – The net result of new capital wealth formation is to create more productive land, industrial plant and equipment, machinery, tools, et cetera. In a highly technological economy the purpose of scientific advancement is not to create jobs (labor intensive production), but to substitute more efficient machines, buildings, tools, and productive land for labor – human work effort. This is the basis of increasing productiveness, and has been since the invention of the wheel to today’s age of cybernetics. Invention and innovation are supposed to save labor and free people for the enjoyment of the good life, the pursuant of happiness, and the improvement of their minds and bodies – to enable the fulfillment of the needs of the flesh (man’s material needs and well-being), so that the works of the soul may flow.

5. Nonpublic close corporations – All non-publicly registered and traded corporations, that is, those that are close corporations owned by a few people, and not classified under definitions set by the Small Business Administration, Department of Commerce, as a “small business,” or whose stock is not traded on the open markets and broadly owned, should be taxed as personal holding companies. The tax policy for close corporations, which by their nature concentrate wealth and limit free enterprise, should result in expanded ownership of capital wealth and discourage such organizations.

The income of such corporations should be treated as the personal incomes of their owners and taxed at personal income tax rates as herein recommended.

This tax policy will discourage private concentrations of capital wealth, and encourage viable small businesses and widespread private popular ownership shares in the small and large business corporations of America.

6. Public corporations – Tax policy of the Federal Government should encourage broad private ownership of public corporations. Publicly registered business corporations should be taxed on a basis, which encourages broad ownership and the fullest distribution of earnings to their owners.

The following tax policies for all publicly owned private corporations should be applied, based upon the philosophy that a corporation is a creature of the State, created by law, recognized as an “artificial person,” able to amass vast amounts of capital wealth with limited liability, and can have a life in perpetuity. Since a corporation is a legally created entity, and not a human being, its function, powers, responsibilities, and ownership are a matter of significant social, political, and economic policy.

Public corporations should be taxed as follows:

If profits are retained, that is, reinvested and not paid to the stockholder-owners, the corporation would pay a 90 percent tax on retained earnings.

Dividends paid out to stockholders-owners would be deductible from corporate earnings thus making these earnings subject to personal income tax rates.

All subsidiary corporations and partially or wholly owned enterprises of a parent or holding corporation would be taxed as a separate enterprise entity, as under the above recommended policy.

a. Business sole proprietorships and partnerships, and close corporations classified as small business

No change in existing tax procedure are necessary, except that the tax rate on such business incomes would be the same for individuals.

b. Capital gains tax – non-public corporations and close corporations

For individuals, capital gains realized on the sale of a personal residence, owned and occupied by a natural person or persons and/or a family would be taxed at the personal income tax rate.

All other capital gains in property interests (real or personal, securities et cetera) unless exchanged within 1 year for property of equivalent value, would be taxed at the personal income tax rate.

7. Capital property holdings tax: Limits on ownership

All individuals, whether their property is combined with others in joint tenancies, co-tenancies, or community property holdings of natural persons should be subject to a capital property holdings tax if the certified net worth or equity value of the property holding of the taxpayer exceeds $1 million.

8. Tax loopholes and subsidies

Eliminate all.

Legitimate Functions of Government and Governmental Responsibility

Tax policy must, by necessity, be linked to a definition of the legitimate functions of government and governmental responsibility with respect to the uses of Federal tax revenues.

Therefore, the tax revenues flowing to the Federal Government as a result of these recommendations should be used for the following purposes:

1. Promote the general welfare for all people.
2. Encourage viable and broadly owned business enterprise, and a free competitive market.
3. Foster broad private individual ownership of the capital wealth base of our economy.
4. Insure a fair and meaningful stake among individuals in the future of our nation.
5. Promote economic justice for all people.
6. Enhance civilization, and encourage the arts, science, significant educations, and other creative human endeavors.
7. Guarantee individual liberty, and economic security and independence for all people.
8. Promote peace and world enrichment, while providing for the common defense.
9. Encourage community enhancement and environmental quality.
10. Enhance life, health, and personal happiness for all people.
11. Foster domestic tranquility and fraternity.
12. Encourage human tolerance, respect, and personal responsibility and dignity.
13. Promote mutual cooperation and trust for mutual benefit for all people.

Investment Tax Credit

With an economic policy designed to foster widespread private equity ownership participation in the capital wealth assets of our economy, the use and purpose of the investment tax credit device as a special governmental subsidy to private corporations has a significant potential for encouraging broader ownership of income-producing productive property rights among all people.

If an investment tax credit is given to a business organization, it should be limited to finance real new capital wealth expansion for widespread private ownership participation by individuals and families.

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve, whose 12 regional division should be owned by the individual citizens living within those regions,  should stop monetizing unproductive debt and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable EVERY child, woman and man  to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. The CHA would process annually an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets. The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable products and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy. Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.

The Federal Reserve Bank should be used to provide interest-free capital credit (including only transaction and risk premiums) and monetize each capital formation transaction, determined by the same expertise that determines it today – management and banks – that each transaction is viably feasible so that there is virtually no risk to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve Board is already empowered under Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act to reform monetary policy to discourage non-productive uses of credit, to encourage accelerated rates of private sector growth, and to promote widespread individual access to productive credit as a fundamental right of citizenship. The Federal Reserve Board needs to re-activate its discount mechanism to encourage private sector growth linked to expanded productive capital ownership opportunities for all Americans.

National Right To Capital Ownership Act and the Capital Homestead Act

A National Right To Capital Ownership Act and the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act), that restores the American dream, should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.

Justice-Committed Leaders

We need new justice-committed leaders, especially those who want to end the corruption built into our exclusionary system of monopoly capitalism – the main source of corruption of any political system, democratic or otherwise. We need to advocate the need to radically overhaul the Federal tax system and monetary policies and institute proposals to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings. Under the Just Third Way’s (http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797) more just and simple tax system, access to ownership of the means of production in the future would by provided to every child, woman and man by requiring the government to lift all existing legal and institutional barriers to private property stakes as a fundamental human right. The system was made by people and can be changed by people. Guided by the right principles of economic justice, “we the people” can organize and demand that the system be reorganized to make true economic democracy the new foundation for true political democracy. The result of this movement of new justice-committed leaders and activists will be inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.

Conclusion

Without bringing about the necessary balance between production and consumption, hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and responsible economic growth.

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 become 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.

Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.

To achieve this goal requires investment in FUTURE income-producing, wealth-creating productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing successfully managed large corporations and future corporations. Not only is employee ownership the norm to be sought wherever there are workers but beyond employee ownership the norm should be to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY American can benefit financially by owning a Super IRA-type Capital Homestead Account portfolio of income-producing, full-voting, full-dividend payout securities in America’s expanding corporations and those newly created to produce the future goods, products and services needed and wanted by society.

This master plan agenda can be accomplished by applying the logic of corporate finance, which is self-financing and asset-backed credit for productive uses to grow the economy. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself. The problem facing the nation is routed in the financial system, which must be reformed.

The ultimate result that we should seek is growing independence of an economically emancipated people both from reliance upon government and from the wage slavery brought into being by monopolistic and oligarchic ownership, and the role and function in our lives both of government and of monopoly and oligarchic ownership ought to diminish.

If we are ever able to ignite our economy and build a future economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen, we need to empower EVERY worker and citizen (children, women and men) to become individual share owners in the corporations growing the economy.

These are the solutions to America’s economic decline, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. 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).

Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy 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/.