On July 11, 2012, University of California at Berkeley Professor Robert Reich lays out what’s at stake in the 2012 Presidential Election.
Professor Reich “dances” around the BIG ISSUE while stating the wealthy want to get wealthier through tax cuts and less regulation, implemented by making corporations people so that vast sums of money can be injected into political campaigns.
We will not solve our severe predicament by taxing our way out of the concentrated ownership of wealth that our system has perpetrated and redistributing those earnings through government expenditures. This is not to say that EVERY citizen should not pay their fair share of the tax burden.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, the government will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that products and services are actually produced.
There are actionable policies that will dramatically impact the market economy and strengthen the middle class in a positive and sustainable way, while expanding the base of private capital ownership and thus strengthening the way consumers make the money to purchase the products and services made possible by the new capital formation. The result will be to expand production and bring more wealth to the economy, which will provide not only growth in expanded ownership of productive capital but also in expanded employment opportunities as the economy revs up to meet expanded consumer demand. Furthermore, the more broadly real capital is acquired by individuals throughout our society with the earnings of capital, the more we will profitably employ unused capacity and promote economic growth. With greater earnings from capital worker investment, people will be able to support and pay for products resulting from “greener” technologies that today people cannot afford. Such policies are perfectly in tune with the natural incentive of business corporations to broaden ownership so that the market for their products will increase. Such policies will liberate the economy.
If we do not succeed at putting our nation on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice through significant broadened private, individual ownership of future productive capital economic growth, then prepare for our nation being thrown back into recession, if not depression.
The BIG ISSUE is not being presented or discussed!!
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs. Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial,and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.
WAKE-UP AMERICA!!
