Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) President and CEO Gary Shapiro shared his thoughts on Americans not seeking work on FoxNews.com on May 1, 2012:
He quotes Charles Murray, author of “Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960 – 2010,” who wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn’t even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren’t working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.”
Shapiro concludes that:
“The slowly declining national unemployment rate typically cited (now at 8.2 percent) understates the true number of unemployed Americans because it only includes those actively looking for work in the past four weeks and not those who have left the work force.”
“The ‘official’ unemployment rate that measures adults who have left the workforce (Bureau of Labor Statistics U-6) is 14.8 percent. Even this probably underestimates things, because it does not include those who never entered the workforce or those who failed to seek unemployment benefits after leaving the workforce.”
“Whatever the true number of unemployed able-bodied Americans, it is much larger than it should be. These people are straining our economy and our collective ability to support them.”
As Murray, also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in his recent book, Coming Apart: “(O)nce, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in the community… (N)ow it doesn’t.”
Shapiro says:
“This perfectly captures our cultural shift.”
“One problem is that our legal benefits, intended to help the truly needy, also encourage the able bodied to play the system.”
“Our parents’ generation believed in hard work as an ethical mandate. Too many in our generation have shifted to a concept that because something is ‘legal’ it is ethical.”
There is no denying that there are people who fit the “bum” categorization described by Murray, and there is no disputing that the “unemployed straining our economy and our collective ability to support them,” as Shapiro has stated.
This condition is destined to worsen unless we address the structural problems in the American economy and face the reality that exponentially “real” job opportunity will continue to significantly decrease until we, as a nation, embrace the productivity merits of full-on automation (superautomated factories, robotics, machines, computerized production and service processes, etc––all non-human inputs) and accelerating technology, which is forming the economy of the future. Until we create opportunity and empower ALL Americans to acquire viable private, individual ownership stakes in this new, non-human productive capital asset-based economy, we will be forced to continue on out path of wealth redistribution through taxation and debt to finance “make-work employment” “military-industrial boondoggle contracts,” and “welfare” to prop up the economy. This is having the long term negative social impact that Murray and Shapiro see as unwanted, and who would not disagree. It destroys dignity, the family, our youth, motivation, innovation––all the aspects make up America’s inner strength.
What we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from people labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital workers (via capital ownership of stock in corporations) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.
As binary economist Louis Kelso asserted, “the government continues to discharge its responsibility for the health and prosperity of the economy through coerced trickle-down; in other words, through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed.”
We need to begin to focus on Full Production, not Full Employment. When America starts out on a path to Full Production, a derivative benefit will be Full Employment with “real” job creation and job growth simultaneously with growth of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––which is the engine of our future.
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 (the non-human factor) 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.
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. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. 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. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.
Kelso 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.”
The one sure way to close the “jobs gap” is to adopt the scenario where new economic growth is financed with mechanisms that extend pure insured capital credit to ALL citizens to acquire newly issued shares of stock in our major corporations and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings generated by the new productive capital assets (non-human factor of production), and gain greater access to “real” job opportunities that a growth economy generates. And as this new economy takes form with the secondary benefit of creating “real” job opportunities, ALL citizens within a generation or so will have acquired a viable ownership stake in the future economy that will earn them income for the rest of their lives.
