On June 6, 2012, Jonathan Haidt of The Guardian wrote an excellent balanced piece published on AlterNet.org.
“Sadly, when people fear the collapse of their society, they want order and national greatness,not a more nurturing government.
“…politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It’s more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programs.
“The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters’ hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we’ll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don’t want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That’s what families are for.”
I too believe in patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility and free enterprise, but also in social and economic justice.
Without the economic security and the dignity of contributing economic value to society created through one’s human (labor) and non-human (productive capital) contributions, the values associated with strong families and personal responsibility are challenged with people feeling less economically and socially secure in their future.
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, the contribution that most people make, and capital worker input, the owners of the non-human productive capital, 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. And while the labor movement had to fight hard for better working conditions and pay, most people were able to fine employment in the private sector. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance began to channel its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, which is what we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels. Increasingly it is becoming more difficult to earn a viable living on labor wage earnings as the result of these tectonic shifts in the technologies of production will continue to destroy jobs and degrade the wage earnings of those fortunate to have a job.
Therefore, in order for us to live up to our desires for social order, strong families, and personal responsibility, we need to acknowledge technology’s impact and embrace it, but with the clear vision and goal of broadening its future ownership so that ALL Americans own productive capital assets that will produce a second income. Doing so will make Americans better customers for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man [and woman] that second income.
In such a society, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for 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.
If we do not succeed with the necessary financial structural reforms to bring this change about we will be left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another, and become further dependent on government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income, while at the same time a tiny minority further concentrates future productive capital ownership. This is unjust and dysfunctional and does not reinforce and strengthen our value systems of social order, strong families, and personal responsibility.
