On January 3, 2013, Richard (RJ) Eskow writes on Nation Of Change:
What’s the economic issue we should focus on – jobs, or inequality? An increasing number of people, including the President and New York’s new mayor, have suggested that inequality of wealth and opportunity is the defining issue of our time.
But some of the folks at the Washington Post’s “WonkBlog” are having none of it. First editor Ezra Klein declared that unemployment, not inequality, should be the left’s defining issue. That drew responses from the likes of Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein (and yours truly, here).
Then Dylan Matthews, a staff reporter on the team (and creator of the highly addictive “Knowmore” site) used a hypothetical scenario to challenge the importance of inequality. Matthews took to a platform called “TwitLonger” (which, parenthetically, looks a lot like something we used to call a “blog”) to argue that people who consider inequality our society’s defining issue “really think the gap between the rich and poor, separate from the actual positions of the rich and poor on their own, is the problem.”
Matthews imagines a future America where poverty, hunger, and homelessness are eliminated; unemployment’s below 4 percent; and GDP and median wages keep growing. If you think inequality is the problem, says Matthews, you won’t be satisfied.
“If that sounds preposterous,” writes Matthews, “then maybe it’s because you don’t actually think inequality is our biggest problem. You think something like poverty or joblessness or median wage stagnation is. And you’re right.”
What is MISSING? The author and his referenced contributors are ALL limited to one-factor thinking––that labor creates all wealth. They completely appear to be oblivious to the real reason for economic inequality and perpetual unemployment and underemployment. The real reason is that technology is resulting in tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, which require far less human labor. As a result, given the current invisible structure of the economy, except for a relative few, the majority of the population, no matter how well educated, will not be able to find a job that pays sufficient wages or salaries to support a family or prevent a lifestyle, which is gradually being crippled by near poverty or poverty earnings.
For decades employment opportunity in the United States was such that the majority of people could obtain a job that could support their livelihood, though, in most cases related to a family, it eventually required the father and mother to both work, if they aspired to live a “middle-class” lifestyle. With “Free Trade” those opportunities began to disintegrate as corporations sought to seek lower-cost production taking advantage of global cheap labor rates and non-regulation, as well as lower tax rates abroad. This resulted in a chain reaction forcing more and more companies to outsource in order to stay competitive (thus the rise of China, India, Mexico, and other third-world nation economies).
At the same time, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production were exponentially occurring (and continue to do so), which resulted (and continues to result) in less job opportunities as production was shifted from people making things to “machines” (the non-human factor) of technology making things. The combination of cheap global labor costs and lower, long-term-invested “machine” costs has forced the worth of labor downward, and this will continue to be the reality. Our only way to far greater prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice is to embrace technological innovation and invention and the resulting human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. as the primary economic engine of growth.
But significantly, unless we reform our system to empower EVERY American to acquire, via pure, interest-free insured capital credit loans, viable full-ownership holdings (and thus entitlement to full-dividend earnings) in the companies growing the economy, with the future earnings of the investments paying for the initial loan debt to acquire ownership, the concentration of ownership of ALL future productive capital will continue to be amassed by a wealthy minority ownership class. Companies will continue to globalize in search of “customers with money” or simply fail, as exponentially there will be fewer and fewer customers to support their businesses worldwide. Why, because the majority will be disconnected from the dividend income derived from the non-human means of production that is replacing the need for labor workers who earn wages and salaries, which are then used to purchase products and services.
If Richard Eskow really wants to significantly narrow the widening gap in economic inequality he would be advocating for economic policies that effectively broaden private sector individual ownership in the viable, profitable corpoations what are producing the bulk of the products and services need and wanted by society.
Richard Eskow should support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice, and the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm.
See “President Obama Puts Spotlight On Economic Inequality” at http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-puts-spotlight-economic-inequality-1387811548 and at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/president-obama-economic-inequality_b_4491098.html.
Also see “Perpetual Unemployment And Underemployment” at http://www.nationofchange.org/perpetual-unemployment-and-underemployment-1388414374 and at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/perpetual-unemployment-an_b_4516814.html.
http://www.nationofchange.org/jobs-or-inequality-s-no-choice-all-1388760533
