--if the taxpayers of
the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road
system, Henry Ford's astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become
a billionaire out of the automobile industry."
In the 1920s and 30s
British engineer CH Douglas, author of the "social credit" alternative
financial system, observed that the incredible productivity of any individual
in a modern industrialized economy has very little to do with the individual's
own talents and efforts but is rather a consequence of our "cultural
inheritance" of all the productive infrastructure and technologies that our
civilization has collectively built up over centuries. Henry Ford's success depended on just
this kind of cultural inheritance of advanced technologies like mining and
metallurgy and machining and electricity and rubber and engines and gasoline and
factory organization of resources and labor and, of course, the national road
system.
Already by the mid-1800s
such diverse writers as John Stuart Mill ("Principles of Political Economy",
1848) and Marx/Engels (The Communist Manifesto", 1848) were recognizing that in
an industrialized economy where machinery replaces human labor, it is no longer
necessary or even desirable to attempt "full employment" because all of the
people's economic needs and wants can be produced with much less human
work. Even that great advocate of
free trade David Ricardo, in his 1817 book, "Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation", in his chapter, "On Machinery", acknowledged that the Luddites
were right, that the adoption by capitalists of machinery really is damaging to
the interests of the laboring classes.
Machinery, Ricardo wrote, "renders the population redundant".
Douglas saw this too,
that the labor of the entire population was no longer necessary to the
productive process. Nevertheless
the producers still need a "market" to sell their outputs, so they still need a
population of "consumers" of those outputs. As a solution Douglas advocated (in a context where the
government reclaims its money issuing power from the bankers) that the
government issue to every citizen a "national dividend", which they receive by
virtue of their owning a share of the nation's cultural inheritance of natural
resources and an industrial economy.
Every American owns an equal share of USA Inc, and every American
receives a money dividend that enables him or her to purchase a share of the
industrial output.
This is more
complicated in today's globalized production system where Chinese and global
goods have significantly replaced American goods in America's consumer economy,
but the principle of a national dividend is still applicable. Milton Friedman, intellectual father of
today's dominant neoliberal worldview, advocated a negative income tax, which
Nixon supported when he was told that by paying a "guaranteed annual income" he
could eliminate welfare bureaucrats.
JS Mill observed that in a post-employment industrial economy, the issue
of distribution of the fruits of production would have to be decided by a
political process.
The market system
only pays incomes to contributors to the productive process, so if
industrialization creates large scale structural unemployment then some other
means of income distribution is needed to get purchasing power into the hands
of the "redundant" population. But
Romantic conservatives to this day continue to appeal to "the invisible hand of
the free market" to "automatically" manage income and wealth distributions,
even though income and wealth distributions within a corporatized economy are
determined by power, exercised by self-serving "men", not by disinterestedly
objective and non-human "market forces".
Pettigrew's only
folly is found at the very end of his book where he admires the new soviet
government of Russia, before the authoritarian realities of soviet communism
(meet the new boss, same as the old boss) became apparent. I spent my life in small business and I
believe in individual free enterprise, and I don't agree that socialism is the
answer to "grand theft nation".
I share OpEd News commenter Old Codger's doubt that there is a realistic
solution.
I agree with Leopold Kohr
("The Breakdown of Nations", 1957) and his friend and student E.F.
Schumacher ("Small is Beautiful", 1973) that "bigness"
itself is the problem. You can't
have "mass society" without having big business and big finance and
big government, and these centers of big money and power are magnets for
wealth, power and status hungry individuals who strive energetically and often
ruthlessly to get their hands on these levers of power. So I agree with Codger that we cannot
reform "their" big systems, because "they" will always do
whatever it takes to maintain their wealth, power and status monopolies within
the systems that they built for that purpose.
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