On December 13, 2013, Richard (RJ) Eskow writes on Nation Of Change:
But the phrase that keeps coming to mind, especially when it comes to the unemployed, is more than 200 years old – 229 years, to be exact. And while its gender-specific phrasing may render it antiquated, the expression’s meaning is sadly relevant in today’s political world:
Man’s inhumanity to man.
This deplorable situation of a growing chronic underemployment will continue until such time that our political leadership, academia, and the national media begin to address the root problem that is holding back our nation’s economic growth. The problem is that unemployment insurance dependency will not cease until our nation addresses the reality that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production destroy jobs and devalue the worth of labor, forcing people to resort to low-wage jobs and welfare support as their ONLY means of financial subsistence.
The reality is that increasingly EVERY human is having more and more interactions with machines and fewer with human beings. There is no escape from technological unemployment long-term as much more is to come.
The percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. In every industry, we are witnessing fewer interactions with other human beings. While conventional economists, academia, and political leadership has called upon education as the solution, the changes are coming so quickly it will be difficult for workers to retrain themselves. They are disadvantaged to compete with super-computers, which can program themselves to improve their performance. Even if the entire American population was college educated, there still would not be the need in the private sector to create jobs in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work due to human work constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Technology increasingly is demonstrating skills on a par with and even surprising human skills.
Sadly, unless addressed and the system reformed, unemployment and underemployment will continue to be the prospect and the plight of a growing segment of the American population, solely dependent on low-pay hourly wage jobs, unemployment insurance, and supplemental support government welfare, which costs taxpayer billions of dollars, if not future trillions, and furthers our dependency on never-ending national debt.
Our nation must realistically realize that two factors of production, human and non-human, are the source of production of products and services. Productive capital IS increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. Therefore it is imperative that productive capital should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Once one comes to the realization that both labor and capital are independent factors of production, and that capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then the logical conclusion is that 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.
Our focus should be on OWNERSHIP CREATION in which employees of companies and other ordinary citizens OWN full-dividend paying and voting stock in the corporations they work for and patronize, and build over time a diversified portfolio of wealth-creating, income-generating stock assets that will provide them a second income beyond their reliance on a job and government support welfare open and concealed. We need to reform the system to provide equal opportunity for EVERY American to become an OWNER, just like the wealthy ownership class, and significantly improve their long-term financial security. The focus needs to be on FUTURE sustainable production and broadened individual ownership. This will put us on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice and in the short-term significantly grow our economy with “full-employment” opportunities as EVERY American benefits from two sources of income derived from the building of a future growth economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen.
See “How To Reverse The Increasing Reliance Of Low-Wage Workers On Billions In Aid And Restore Economic Growth” at http://www.nationofchange.org/how-reverse-increasing-reliance-low-wage-workers-billions-aid-and-restore-economic-growth-1382195936#comment-294097 and at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/how-to-reverse-the-increa_b_4125981.html.
http://www.nationofchange.org/budget-deal-dirge-unemployed-1386948767
