Kathy Gornik: The economic ignorance of our policy makers is profound. For those of us who understand that taking money from producers and giving it non producers does not grow but rather destroys the economy, it is important to push back with the truth. Valerie Jarrett needs to be fired and replaced by someone who understands how wealth and jobs are created. Valerie Jarrett: ‘People Who Receive that Unemployment Check Go Out and Spend It and Help Stimulate. www.weeklystandard.com This evening, speaking at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said that folks getting and spending unemployment checks is a healthy thing . . . because it stimulates the economy.
Gary Reber Comments: Unfortunately, President Obama and the Republican hope-to-be presidential candidates all fail to see that the overriding goal should be to broaden ownership of productive capital assets (the non-human factor of production or wealth creation…) simultaneously with stimulating the economy with tax incentives. Without policies and programs to broaden ownership, the productive sector of the economy will continue to be owned by a powerful minority. Obama’s policies and proposals will further this result, and will do little to benefit the economic opportunity for the 99 percent to make a good living. As technological innovation is further spurred as a result of tax incentives the result will be further job displacement as superautomation, automated factories, and other computer-controlled and operated processes accelerate. Unless the American people can own in this future growth, the American dream will be dead. It will perpetuate a “system” where investment is only based on savings and continue to shut out the poor and working and middle class people who are struggling to meet living needs. No where does Romney advocate a reform of the “system” to support investment incentives that stimulate economic growth while at the same time empowering the 99 percent to acquire ownership of productive capital and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings of the capital investments.
Private property rights, and thus the capital worker earnings of owners of productive capital should not be taken away and given to “non producers” or non-owners and wage- and salary-dependent labor workers or to people dependent on welfare… in a world where true economic democracy prevails. But, at present, this world does not exist because over 90 percent of all productive capital is owned by 1 to 10 percent of the people. Thus, the poor and working and middle classes are systematically shut out of the system from acquiring viable ownership in income-producing capital formation and paying for their acquisition out of assets’ future earnings. Thus, if private property rights were fully honored in today’s undemocratic economy, people would experience a significant decline in earnings and thus be forced to lower their desire to consume the products and services that the economy is capable of producing. More people would be forced into poverty and become more dependent on government and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government. Thus, we would be left with government policies that further redistribute income in one form or another to just provide subsistence to increasing larger segments of the society unable to earn a decent living wage (or to acquire viable capital ownership). This supports the argument that “folks getting and spending unemployment checks is a healthy thing…because it stimulates the economy.” But this is narrow and short-term thinking. The real goal should be to broaden ownership of productive capital, the non-human factor and increasingly the principal factor in the creation of wealth in technology-advancing society. In a democratic growth economy, based on Louis Kelso’s binary economics, the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. This will also simultaneously reduce the need for income redistribution to support welfare programs. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.
