On August 5, 2013, Kathleen Geier writes on Salon.com:
Using data from over 3,000 counties, their results show that when a Walmart store opens, it kills an average 150 retail jobs at the county level, with each Walmart worker replacing about 1.4 retail workers. These results are robust under a variety of models and tests.
Other strong studies found similar results. A 2008 peer-reviewed study that looked at Maryland concluded that Walmart’s presence significantly decreased retail employment, by up to 414 jobs. And a 2009 study by Loyola University found that the opening of a Chicago Walmart store was “a wash,” destroying as many jobs as it created: “There is no evidence that Wal-Mart sparked any significant net growth in economic activity or employment in the area,” according to the report. In short, when Walmart comes to town, it doesn’t “create” anything. All it does is put mom-and-pop stores out of business.
What is being overlooked is the reality that Wallmart, as with other businesses, has as its objective to maximize profits for its owners. Companies are constantly evaluating ways to reduce operating costs, improve product and service quality, and accelerate company growth. To the extent that human labor is necessary for a company’s operations, the company will attempt to pay the least amount of wage possible, which is largely determined by competitive market conditions. They will also seek to improve productiveness by replacing human labor with non-human productive capital instruments of production such as human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. in order to reduce costs and improve quality of production, in the case of product manufacturing. By shifting from labor intensive to productive capital intensive inputs, the company not only saves money expended on labor wages, but also worker benefits. With “machines,” labor wages are eliminated, as well as the need to provide benefits. The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work, which produces income for its owners.
Thus, the reality is that full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. 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. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
As technology replaces the need for labor, the worth of labor is diminished and people, desperate for income, reduce their expectations for wages and end up competing with tens or hundreds or thousands of other people for fewer and fewer jobs. This, in turn, reduces the number of “customers with money” to purchase the products and services that can be produced and puts further pressure on companies to reduce costs to maintain sales volume and profitability.
The solution is not to focus on “jobs creation” and artificially boosting wages, but to focus on financing economic growth in ways that broaden individual ownership of the FUTURE physical productive capital assets of a growth economy, thereby connecting people with earnings generated from their productive capital asset portfolios, to supplement their labor wages or entirely eliminate their need to be employed or dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and concealed.
Let’s connect every American with a growing, viable wealth-creating, income-generating ownership interest in America’s FUTURE non-human productive capital assets, embodied in corporations. Let the “machines” do the work but ensure that we, as individuals, own the “machines” and thus the private property entitlement to the earnings generated.
Reduction or elimination of corporate income taxes should be an incentive when corporations finance FUTURE growth enabling their employees and others to acquire ownership with “future savings (earnings).
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.org http://www.nationofchange.org/financing-future-economic-growth-future-savings-solutions-protect-america-economic-decline-137450624
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/05/walmart%E2%80%99s_big_lie_no_it_doesnt_create_jobs/
