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Gary Reber Comments:
There is a reason for the endless growth of wealth inequality – perpetual concentrated capital asset ownership.
The correct role of businesses should be to contribute to society by creating and making available goods, products and services that improve people’s lives in tangible ways. But unfortunately academics and the politicians who retain them as economic advisors, always couch this purpose in the ability of businesses to provide employment that enables people to afford the goods, products, and services of other businesses. They think in terms of worker productivity instead of understanding that real productivity gains are due to non-human productive input. Unfortunately, their thinking is limited to one-factor thinking: jobs and labor input that fails to acknowledge productive non-human capital assets, the far more powerful engine of creating and making available goods, products and services. This non-human productive factor is the result of constant technological invention and innovation. We need to face the reality that employment is not sufficient enough to secure economic prosperity for the majority of Americans when confronted with tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that eliminate jobs and devalue the worth of labor. What is essential to redefine capitalism is to empower EVERY child-, women-, and man-citizen to become an owner of the wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets that result in the creation of products and services that improve people’s lives.
This should not be difficult to understand. In fact, there is a simple reason why inequality is widening. It is the perpetual CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of productive capital assets (land, structures, machines, super-automation, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), digital computerization, etc.) due to a system that bases FUTURE growth on financing with “past” savings, rather than finance economic growth paid for with “future” savings out of the earnings of the investments. The reason the already wealthy ownership class always gets richer is because they are the people who have accumulated savings and are able to reinvest to accumulate more wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets formed to grow the economy domestically and globally.
Unfortunately, conventional economists, academia, political leaders, and the national media assume that the only way to finance new wealth-creating, income-producing capital is by cutting consumption and accumulating money savings. While incorrect, such thinking leads to the conclusion that only the rich can OWN or that the State must own or control the rich by exercising its coercive powers so the rich do what’s right.
The system, as presently structured, prevents Americans without savings and equity assets, the 99 percent, from participating as a productive capital owner contributor and from acting fully as a “customer with money” for the goods, products, and services produced by physical assets in the form of advanced tools created to perform tasks that human are physically and mentally unable to perform and to perform tasks more efficiency and less costly.
The capitalism practiced today is what, for a long time, I have termed Hogism, propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. Hogism institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). Hogism is about the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. They sell every capital project on the basis that it will “create jobs” when the real wealth-building benefits are vested in the already wealthy capital ownership class who seek to own more capital wealth. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success, always focused on producing most efficiency and at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the goods, products, and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you cannot have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
Liberals and progressive advocating for “rise up economics” should be focused on creating a reformed system paradigm resulting in a democratic growth economy in which the ownership of productive capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from those who already own but ensure that future capital wealth is not further concentrated among those who already are wealthy. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, benefiting EVERY citizen, including the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for goods, 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. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more “green,” environmentally protective and enhanced productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy that can produce general affluence for EVERY citizen.
Influential economists and business leaders, as well as political leaders and concerned citizens, should read Harold Moulton’s The Formation Of Capital, in which he argues that it makes no sense to finance new productive capital out of past savings. Instead, economic growth should be financed out of future earnings (savings), and provide that every citizen become an owner. The Federal Reserve, which has been largely responsible for the powerlessness of most American citizens, should set an example for all the central banks in the world. Members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn’t enough savings in the system to finance economic growth. We should not destroy the Federal Reserve or make it a political extension of the Treasury Department, but instead reform it so that the American citizens in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Regions become the owners. The result will be that money power will flow from the bottom up, not from the top down, not for consumer credit, not for credit that doesn’t pay for itself or non-productive uses of credit, but for credit for productive uses to expand the economy’s rate of growth.
Enacting monetary reform and the Capital Homestead Act would grow the United States economy faster in a non-inflationary way, create new private sector jobs (not make-work), finance new productive capital and provide capital incomes for all Americans from the bottom-up by enabling them to own trillions annually in new capital formation and transfers in current assets . . . without taking private property rights away from those who already are capital owners.
The wage system is the cancer. The ownership system is the answer to address the problem of economic inequality Robert Reich and others want to solve.
If you want to change the gross economic inequality infecting our nation, support the Platform of the Unite America Party and make sure its planks are incorporated into all political discussion.
What the Democrats and Republicans and all third party leaders need to advocate is their ability to lead America on a path based on a paradigm shift to an equal opportunity economic democracy.
The JUST Third Way is a radical overhaul of the economic system (i.e., the Federal tax system, Federal Reserve policy, inheritance law, welfare and entitlement system, etc.) that will achieve genuine economic democracy, based on the Platform of the Unite America Party and its links and the proposed Capital Homestead Act. Our Platform is a call for a vision of political economy that can unite the left and the right, based on binary economist Louis Kelso’s capital ownership-based paradigm.
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jtw-graphicoverview-2013.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act and Economic Empowerment Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
Now is the time to cure America’s political cancer (Crony Capitalism) and restore America to again becoming a model for global citizens in all countries.
For a new vision support the Unite America Party Platform, published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html and OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by-Gary-Reber-Party-Leadership_Party-Platforms-DNC_Party-Platforms-GOP-RNC_Party-Politics-Democratic-140630-60.html.
Along with the specific policies advocated in the proposed Capital Homestead Act, other policies require implementation to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings. Under The Just Third Way more just and simple tax system, access would by provided to ownership of the means of production in the future to every child, woman and man by requiring the government to lift all existing legal and institutional barriers to private property stakes as a fundamental human right. The system was made by people and can be changed by people. Guided by the right principles of economic justice, we the people can organize and demand that the system be reorganized to make true economic democracy the new foundation for true political democracy.
