On February 7, 2013, Michael A. Memoli writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Obama told his party’s House members that in his address to Congress next Tuesday he would outline an agenda for economic growth that ensures all Americans can thrive, balancing further deficit reduction efforts with needed investments to grow the economy.
While President Obama’s rhetoric is engagingly vague––”an agenda for economic growth that ensures all Americans can thrive”––there must be a policy action master plan.
What is needed is a balanced Just Third Way approach to building a FUTURE economy that supports affluence for EVERY American. This requires investment in FUTURE income-producing productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing corporations and future corporations. Not only is employee ownership the norm to be sought wherever there are workers but beyond employee ownership the norm should be to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY American can benefit financially by owning a SUPER IRA-TYPE Capital Homestead Account portfolio of income-producing, full-voting, full-dividend payout securities in America’s expanding corporations and those newly created to produce the future products and services needed and wanted by society.
Political and private sector leadership is required to transform the American economic system, especially our terribly flawed money and credit systems, to enable every citizen to become an empowered citizen-owner as a fundamental human right. The social technologies for turning formerly propertyless citizens into participatory and empowered capital owners on capital credit repayable with future savings have been successfully proven.
Policies are needed to ensure that where taxpayer monies (whether obtained from tax extraction or debt, as in national debt and deficits) are expended to “stimulate” the private sector (through government subsidies, loan guarantees, grants, and contracts with corporations building infrastructure and economic development, including the military-industrial complex), that stipulations are attached that the financial benefit results in broadened private, individual ownership of the particular companies and that the full earnings of the investments are paid out to their owners.
In order to ensure that the economy operates most efficiently, productive capital must be broadly owned. This is because as technology advances, people cannot produce enough by labor alone to permit them to purchase everything that others produce with their productive capital assets. Logically, if productive capital is doing most of the work of production (the physical aspect of producing products and services), and private property includes the right to receive the income generated by what is owned, as labor becomes less productive (essentially less necessary when replaced or devalued by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, biobotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) relative to productive capital, people who formerly relied on labor must shift to owning productive capital to carry out the work of production.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
