Saying he sees a possible “breakthrough” year for the U.S. economy, President Obama touted a new manufacturing institute in this state’s technology hub, an election-year attempt to show he can advance his agenda without his Republican opponents in Congress.
“Today, I’m here to act,” Obama told students Wednesday at North Carolina State University, the leading partner behind the new innovation center in the Research Triangle.
The goal, he said, was “to help make Raleigh–Durham and America a magnet for the good high-tech manufacturing jobs that a growing middle class requires and that are going to continue to keep this country on the cutting edge.”
The consortium, a public-private partnership involving 18 companies, will focus on developing semiconductor technology used in energy-efficient products.
The project was selected as part of a competition for federal support that Obama first announced in his State of the Union address a year ago. It will receive $70 million over five years from the Department of Energy, the White House said, a figure that will be matched by at least $70 million from businesses, universities and the state.
The president said he was cheered by companies bringing jobs to the U.S., evidence he said of a possible “breakthrough year.”
“The pieces are all there to start bringing back more of the jobs that we’ve lost over the past decade,” he said.
A possible manufacturing renaissance, driven by high-tech companies and skilled workers, has been a favorite topic for the president, and his push for innovation centers has been a favorite example of his ability take action on his own.
Still, the initiative also demonstrates the limit of executive power.
In announcing the idea last year, Obama called for 15 centers across the country, funded, in part, by $1 billion in federal support. Congress never approved the money, and the administration is moving forward only on three sites with previously approved funding.
The two other winning partnerships will be named in the coming weeks, the White House said.
President Obama and his economic advisors are stuck in one-factor LABOR ONLY thinking. Their focus is on JOBS CREATION and particularly high-tech technology jobs.
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. Thus, education is not the panacea, though it is critical for our future societal development. And younger, as well as older people, will increasingly find it harder and harder to secure a well-paying job––for most, their ONLY source of income––and will find themselves dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and disguised or concealed.
President Obama intent to bolster the tech sector with skilled workers is a worth-while objective, but what we, as a nation, must realize is that our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves of the technological assets they create for corporations, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner 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.
If President Obama and his advisors viewed the process of production of products and services as consisting of two independent factors––human and non-human––they would realize that the non-human factor––productive capital––is becoming more productive, NOT human labor. They should also realize that most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution can be attributed to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Productive capital 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.
Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). The technology industry is always changing, evolving and innovating. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
This is a simple concept that describes the economics of reality, but President Obama and his advisors fail to grasp its significance, which when grasped leads to ONE possible solution that strengthens our founding principles in private property.
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.
Binary economist Louis Kelso, who President Obama and his economists advisors should study, was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in turmoil and upheaval, if not revolution.
President Obama is trapped in the false presumption that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system––ignoring the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies (which his high-tech initiative will boost) and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity. Obama’s economist advisors and other conventional one-factor economists fail to see this simple cause and effect relationship. Binary economist Louis Kelso argued that their Keynesian model fails to recognize that “when capital workers (owners) replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.”
Rather than advocate for broader private sector ownership and full dividend payouts of the earnings of corporations, President Obama and other politicians advocate for government policies that behold the poor and middle class to government dependency supported by redistributive tax extraction and national debt.
President Obama suffers from an obviously narrow and unrealistic mindset that also permeates the highest levels of academia and every level of education, from the time a child is first exposed to the educational system. In turn, such mis-education of parents and children totally ignores private property ownership of all non-human “means of production” as an increasingly relevant means by which the economy can both grow faster toward general prosperity and every member of society could legitimately earn a decent living in the future with more and more time to engage in what Aristotle called “leisure work,” producing without material compensation “the goods of civilization” and solve problems demanding uniquely human creative capacities and beyond the creative capacity of computers, robots and other “energy slaves that are replacing the need for human “toil” labor.
If you reject broadened individual private sector ownership of the FUTURE then you will remain OWNED and controlled by others as a wage or welfare slave. Wealthy people are wealthy because they OWN, wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets. The reality is that labor input is becoming exponentially less necessary as humans are replaced by increasingly more productive non-human means of production that produce income for its owners. There will always be less and less human labor input as technology advances and non-human means replace the need.
So how about it President Obama, why not really lead and advocate for broadened ownership of the FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets of corporations growing the economy so that EVERY child, woman and man can benefit as an OWNER and secure a source of income produced by the non-human assets of corporate production? That would result is “A Wonderful Life” for EVERY American by eliminating over time the wide economic inequality that the present system facilitates.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obama-economy-20140116,0,6829503.story#axzz2qaNn3dRL
