On January 10, 2013, Alan Nessar writes on CounterPunch.org:
“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”
– John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, 1930
There is a useful but neglected way of distinguishing a recession from a depression or major economic downturn. After a recession the economy goes back to the “normal” of the previous expansion, whereas after a severe downturn the economy is reconfigured in some significant respect. Nineteenth century American capitalism was in recession or depression almost as often as not, featuring three major depressions and a continuous series of bankruptcies in the period’s major industries, railroads and steel. After the dust had settled, capital had learned to preclude these kinds of ongoing crisis by consolidating, centralizing and mechanizing on an unprecedented scale and virtually banishing cutthroat competition. What emerged was what’s now called organized or oligopoly or monopoly capitalism. The Great Depression was followed by the next new configuration, Keynesian capitalism with its sundry forms of civilian and military government contribution to economic growth and income distribution. With respect to economic security, these were the best years ever for US workers. Alas, then came, in the 1970s, the elite revolt against the “welfare state”, with declining labor income, a corporate revenue squeeze, accelerating credit inflation, rising inequality and financialization.
That prelude to crisis eventually gave rise to the ensuing meltdown of 2007-2008 and the attempt by business and government to reconfigure the old Keynesian settlement into the shape of Microeconomics 101. The world after the current depression will neither look nor feel as it did in the lifetimes of those of us who grew up in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Persistent inequality and lowered living standards will be among the highest costs of neoliberalism, a return to a peculiar fusion of key features of the capitalism of the 1920s (unregulated, free markets and dramatic inequality) and 1930s (high unemployment and lowered living standards).
Americans need to WAKE UP and realize that the FUTURE is one of technological unemployment. 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.
This is the NEW REALITY! The obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE MACHINES and non-human means of production that result from technology.
This new reality is the result of technological innovation and invention, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, and an obsolute union movement stuck in job creation and “more pay for less work” instead of bargaining for employee ownership. Result: no or significantly reduced opportunity for income.
This can be accomplished by appling the logic of corporate finance, which is self-financing and asset-backed credit for productive uses to grow the economy. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself.
The solution is not a focus on JOB CREATION but a focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION whereby EVERY American can acquire private, individual ownership in FUTURE income-producing productive capital investment without the need to limit the financing to past savings and/or requiring workers to reduce their consumption incomes to become owners.
There is a solution. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The fundamental economic solution is to create income for EVERY American by simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital economic growth and fully paying the profit dividends to the new American owners of the income-producing capital assets of our corporations.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/10/the-long-term-jobs-and-wage-picture/
