On August 2, 2012, Eliot Spitzer voiced his Viewpoint With Eliot Spitzer saying:
Mitt Romney’s economic agenda is a disaster. And I’m not even going to talk about the distributional effects — the equity and justice dimensions of this.
Well, I am going to address the equity and justice dimensions of both Romney’s and Obama’s disastrous economic agendas.
Romney represents the Republican “cut spending, cut taxes, and cut ‘entitlements’” while President Obama represents the Democrat “protect ‘entitlements,’ provide tax-payer supported stimulus, lower middle and working class taxes, tax the rich and redistribute” brands of economic policy. Republican ideology aims to revive hard-nosed laissez-faire appeals to hard-core conservatives but ignores the relevancy of healing the economy and halting the steady disintegration of the middle class and working poor.
Some conservative thinkers have acknowledged the damaging results of a laissez-faire ideology, which furthers the concentration of productive capital ownership. They are floundering in search of alternative thinking as they acknowledge the negative economic and social realities resulting from greed capitalism. This acknowledgment encompasses the realization that the troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital will threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.
In a nutshell, neither President Obama or Mitt Romney are addressing this BIG ISSUE. 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.
The downturn in REAL income for middle class individuals and families is because increasingly more and more individuals and families are seeing their jobs disappear or degraded resulting a downward trend in wage and salary levels.
Those offering solutions recommend either bolstering the wealth and earnings of the wealthy minority through further tax rate reductions or more welfare, open or concealed, in the form of essentially make-work jobs, but with higher pay. Neither addresses the OWNERSHIP issue, which if the concentration is not reversed will result in far greater inequality and injustice. Such solutions are on a collision course with the ever-more productive non-human factor of production––productive capital as embodied in the exponential development of human-level artificial intelligence, advanced automation and robotics. Superautomation and robotics is transforming the world of manufacturing as robots become lighter, more mobile, and more flexible with better sensing, perception, decision-making, and planning and control capabilities due to advanced digital computerization. Superautomation and robotics will dramatically improve productivity and provide skills and abilities previously unique to human workers. This will effectively increase the size of the labor work force beyond that provided by human workers, no matter what the level of education attained. Thus, if we do not address the impact of technology on poverty, then millions more Americans in the short term and long term will find themselves at the poverty or below poverty level, unable to be self-suffcient but dependent on “everything from Social Security to Medicare and on through the list.” The immediate challenge is keeping the social welfare programs that we already have.
The transition to the non-human factor of production has been occurring for decades but is now experiencing exponential development––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. As costs for computer-controlled machines become less than the cost of human workers, and the skills and productivity of the machines exceed those of human workers, then robot worker numbers will rapidly increase and enable our society to build architectural wonders, revitalize and redevelop our cities and build new cities of wonder and amazement, and the support energy, transport, and communications systems. With advanced human-level artificial intelligence, computer-controlled machines will be able to learn new knowledge and skills by simply downloading software. This means that the years of training that apply to personal human development will no longer apply to the further sophistication and operation of the machines. The result will be that productivity will soar while the need and demand for human labor will further decline.
Unfortunately, in the long term unless the vast majority of people have a substantial and viable source of income other than wages and salaries, the impact of technological innovation and invention as embodied in human-level artificial intelligence, machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc will be devastating.
There are ONLY two options: either Own or be Owned. The “Owned” model is what our society practices today and is expressed as monopoly capitalism (concentrated ownership) or socialism (taxpayer-supported redistributed social benefits). The “Own” model or what I and others term the Just Third Way (see http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/thirdway-intro.htm) has yet to be implemented on the scale necessary to empower every man, woman, and child to acquire private, individual ownership stakes in the future income-producing productive capital assets of the “machine age”––facilitated by the future earnings of their investments in the companies developing and employing this unprecedented economic power.
Unfortunately, the disruptive nature of exponential growth in technology and its impact on productivity––tectonically shifting production of products and services from human workers to non-human means––is ignored by the economic establishment and our political leaders.
While the rate of technological progress is directly proportional to the number and quality of the people engaged in the fields of science and engineering, economic policy is the mechanism that fuels investment and development of technological innovation and invention. This is where education is critical to our future societal development.
We have the opportunity to free economic growth from the “enslavement” of human labor and from the financial mechanisms that are based on the slavery of past savings. Technological progress though is no longer dependent on the number and quality of human workers. This fact will become obvious eventually to anyone who can think and analyze. That fact is the reality that human labor will cease to be the primary source of wealth production in the future. As a result we can expect over the long term that unemployment and underemployment will remain high indefinitely. But the difference will be that people will drop out of the labor force voluntarily because they will be able to live off their dividend earnings via their ownership portfolios. This will create swelling demand for human workers who want to continue working. And with both dividend and wage and salary incomes for everyone there will be more customers to purchase the products and services produced, which in turn will create further dividends and earnings, which will create more customers, etc.
As for education, everyone will have the opportunity to personally developed their own exceptional innate abilities and unlock their creativity.
This prosperous society is achievable because fortunately, in the near term, we can begin to grow our way out of the swelling unemployment and underemployment by increasing our investment significantly as a ratio of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of future income-producing productive capital investments, thus initiating the process of empowering every man, woman and child to build over time a viable capital estate and reap the income generated. The key operative is BROADEN OWNERSHIP. Such investment would, in the short term, generate millions of new “real” productive jobs. The result would not only be that the GDP would dramatically grow but tax revenues from the high rate of economic growth would enable us to balance the federal budget, fully fund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, provide Universal Health Care, Universal University Education, lower tax rates, and maintain a strong military, all simultaneously.
Over time and within a few decades, our “machined-powered” growth economy would produce greater wealth, and widespread private, individual ownership would assure prosperity, opportunity, and affluence for every citizen. Broadened productive capital ownership would strengthen our democracy and individuals and families would be less or non-dependent on government welfare, whether disguised or not.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
The path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice can be found in the writings about the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm. Also, please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
http://current.com/shows/viewpoint/blog/eliot-spitzer-mitt-romneys-economic-agenda-is-a-disaster/
