Dateline February 10, 2012 Los Angeles Times Opinion Page: Ronald Brownstein writes about “The middle-class safety net.” “…what government has done to repair the economy since 2008 has benefited the same powerful interests that broke it. …amid the public and private austerity imposed by the Great Recession, the conflict over redistribution of wealth has resurfaced. …Republican candidates are again pounding the theme that Washington is spending too much to coddle the poor. … three-fifths of Republicans agreed that ‘poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return. …Tea Partyers ‘see themselves as hardworking Americans whose taxes should not fund benefits for ‘freeloaders.’ …Those trends fuel conservative fears about a culture of dependency. …But spending on safety net programs has increased almost entirely because economic security has plummeted. …Targeting the poor alone won’t be enough to unravel what Romney calls the ‘poison’ of dependency on government…”
We have been steadily headed to greater dependency on government (redistribution of earnings generated by productive citizens) in step with the exponential
My mentor, binary economist Louis Kelso, postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent 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.
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. 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. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Kelso once wrote: “It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on in the scientific world or the business world or the industrial world, we still believe full employment will solve our income distribution problems. This is what major political figures have always maintained.”
Kelso also 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.”
