Steve Benen writes on The Rachel Maddow Blog:
“For several months, the general trend on initial unemployment claims has been encouraging, reaching a four-year low just a few weeks ago. But today’s new report is the second discouraging news we’ve received on this front in as many weeks.”
Rachel Maddow continues to think in terms of one-factor economics and ignores the acknowledgement that two factors comprise the production of products and services. Her one-factor thinking restricts her from seeing beyond a goal of full employment job growth, instead of full production.
Unfortunately, this is the failure of our leaders to acknowledge and plan for dealing with the exponential growth of the non-human factor of production (technologically advanced machinery, superautomation, automated factories, and computerized operations) as the prominent means used to produce products and services. The fact is labor is no longer the principal factor in the creation of wealth.
The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work, which produces income. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. 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. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
People invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
If we continue on our current non-workable path, the result will be further concentrated ownership of productive capital, which will require further redistribution through the tax system in order for the 99 percent to have income to create consumer demand.
Still, there are no leaders who are advocating a reform of our financial system that will end the monopoly the 1 percent now enjoys, which empowers them to continue to amass concentrated ownership of productive capital (represented in income through capital gains and dividends taxed at 15 percent). This unjust system must be reformed so that the 99 percent can acquire productive capital ownership simultaneously with the economy’s growth and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings of the new capital formation investment. This is the Just Third Way that over time will empower the 99 percent to build viable capital estates, while simultaneously optimizing the application of technological innovation and invention and providing jobs as a result of far greater economic growth.
This should be the idea that has a strong political punch.
The path to such prosperity requires recharting the financial system to empower ALL citizens to acquire long term viable private, individual ownership portfolios representing assets of new productive capital (the non-human factor of production embodied in superatomated and computerized processes that require less labor worker or no labor worker input) and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings of the productive capital investments financed by credit insured by the Federal Reserve.
The accelerated growth rate, due to the the infusion of credit into productive capital investment, would result in a majority of Americans earning additional income from wages and salaries and dividend, interest, and capital gains from other opportunities created beyond the dividend income payout from the productive capital investments. The accelerated growth rate would produce jobs that pay well and would significantly expand markets due to rising consumer demand, which in turn would generate greater business profits and opportunity for more productive capital investment. Everyone would benefit––rich and poor. There would be lower unemployment (making for the elimination of make-work), higher personal incomes, lower deficits due to greater tax revenues, lower tax rates, and better government services, with every citizen benefiting from a higher standard of living.
Such a path to prosperity would empower ordinary citizens, the majority of which are capitalless, to own a substantial percentage of the future productive capital formation creating the growth of the economy. The GOAL would be to assure that every man, woman and child would be able to accumulate a portfolio of productive capital assets large enough to provide a secure source of income. After a few decades, dividend income from the ownership of productive capital assets would become the primary source of income, though well-paying job opportunities would be plentiful for those who want to work for the satisfaction that can come from employment, whether in business, education, healthcare, science, and government or other self-rewarding contributions to society.
