Back in an October speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Paul Ryan really leaned into the historic moment. His remarks were titled “Saving the American Idea: Rejecting Fear, Envy and the Politics of Division,” and they were Ryan’s bid to make a different sort of history: to be the first national Republican to lay out a coherent theory on income inequality and what needs to be done about it.
Ryan said, “Class is not a fixed designation in this country…Upward mobility is the real key to the ‘American idea.’”
I hope that one day Washington Post’s Ezra Klein will present the conceptual solution to the Republican platform of essentially bettering those who have made it and the Democratic platform of essentially redistributing the property earnings of those who have made to those who have not to enable them to partially share in economic prosperity, though at the bottom levels of society.
People everywhere need to wake up to the fact that the economic system has shackled 99 percent of us to the powerlessness, propertylessness and hopelessness of economic slavery. The global economy—a power-concentrating, corrupt and baffling triad of monopoly capitalism, socialism and welfare statism––is burdened by unsustainable and non-productive debt, under-employment of people, under-utilization of advanced technologies, and under-funded entitlements.
2012 marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act. At this moment in history, a 21st century version of Lincoln’s visionary ownership-expanding economic policy holds special import. A new system with the goal of broadening private, individual ownership of productive capital and connecting ALL citizens to the full-dividend payout of future investments will lift citizens out of wage, welfare, charity, debt and tax slavery. Such an Emancipation Proclamation is consistent with and supports optimal technological innovation, which at its core saves labor with replacement superautomation of the non-human factor of production of products and services..
To save America and other market economies from financial disaster, the economic system must change and be based on sustainable growth, economic liberty and justice by lifting artificial and unjust legal and institutional barriers to equal productive capital ownership opportunities for every person.
With roughly 1 percent owning 50 percent of the corporate wealth and 10 percent owning 90 percent, this leaves 90 percent of the people scrambling for the last 10 percent, with them dependent on their labor worker wages to purchase productive capital. Thus, we have the great bulk of the people providing a mere 10 percent or less of the productive input. Contrast that to the less than 5 percent who own all the productive capital providing 90 percent or more of the productive input, and who initiate and oversee most of the technological advances that replace labor work with capital work. As a result, the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes capital ever more productive. But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.
See http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ and http://foreconomicjustice.com/759/
