Economic activity is expected to remain fairly slow in the near future. Above, Imanei Cedeno assembles a Makerbot Industries 3-D printer at the company’s new factory in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg / June 12, 2013)
On June 13, 2013, Don Lee writes in the Los Angeles Times:
The latest quarterly survey by the Business Roundtable, representing chief executives of major companies, found just a slight improvement in the outlook for economic activity over the next six months, with a small pickup in sales and hiring.
The results released Wednesday “reflect an economy on the slow road to recovery,” said Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing Co. and chairman of Business Roundtable. The survey was completed by 141 CEOs in the second half of May.
Business Roundtable said 32 percent of these CEOs expected an increase in U.S. employment at their companies over the next six months, up from 29% in the first quarter. But 26 percent forecast a decrease, and that’s up 1 percentage point from three months earlier. The rest see no change in employment.
This is yet another article by Don Lee that focuses on JOBS CREATION, without simultaneously addressing the need for OWNERSHIP CREATION of the FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital asset growth of the United States economy. What Lee and others fail to address is that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are constantly destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor. Far too much of the economy is been supported on life-support by the infusion of debt-based welfare, both open and concealed in order to prop-up consumer demand using income from jobs ONLY.
What is not openly not addressed is the reality that 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.
Physical 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. If both labor and capital are independent 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.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital worker more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-ceo-survey-20130612,0,589915.story
