This condition will continue to persist due to the fundamental inadequacies in the way we manager our economic system. Without reforming the system we continue policies based on the philosophy of helping the unfortunate (those losing jobs) to make it within the existing “full employment” system. Even increasing the fairness of the competition and the equality of opportunity to secure jobs, those w…ho are more aggressive, more intelligent or fortunate to be in the right place at the right time get the better positions, which are limited. As long as the overwhelming percentage of income is distributed through the earnings paid to labor workers, the challenge will be to continue to “create jobs,” which inevitably generates overwhelming pressures for full employment at any cost. The result is that make-work projects of every type and description are created in order to pump up the economy and provide people with earnings from their labor to purchase products and services. If one has no job, then, except for unemployment compensation or welfare, one has no income! For decades we have pursued policies to encourage and foster growth in such a way as to ensure that employment remains high and layoffs are unnecessary whenever possible. Yet the American economy only supports a limited number of jobs in which persons of average intelligence can produce enough wealth to justify present-day inflated wage rates. Paradoxically, such policies have created conditions which virtually guarantee serious unemployment. We have become unconscious as to how productive capital (non-human “things”) has and continues to displace labor (people), with the ownership of productive capital constantly and increasingly concentrated among the 1 percent. As long as the income distribution system is structured so that virturaly all income to the lower and middle classes is derived from labor worker earnings (wages and salaries) we will not be able to realize our full potential in eliminating poverty and progressing toward a state of universal affluence. The “system” requires reform to empower the 99 percent to acquire over time, through credit mechanisms, viable ownership stakes in income-producing productive capital increasingly taking form as superautomation (computer-aided manufacturing and robotics). With broadening ownership of productive capital as the goal, we will be able to unleash the wealth-producing power of available and future machines, computers, and scientific and technical knowledge. Such unleashing of the physical capacity of productive capital will enable the American economy to produce many more products and services than are now produced as much lower prices than now exist and, while at the same time, create many more jobs which need doing than there are unemployed persons seeking work.
