"Every Citizen an Owner"

We take another break in our current series on the restoration of property to refocus attention on the need to reform the institutions that govern the manner in which people can acquire and possess private property in the means of production — one of the primary "inherent" (that is, absolute or natural) rights possessed by every human being, as George Mason of Gunston Hall pointed out in the first paragraph of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. We refer, of course, to money and credit. In a modern advanced economy, money and credit are in large measure controlled by the commercial banking system and the central bank of a country. In the United States, the central bank — actually a network of a dozen regional development banks — is the Federal Reserve System.

That being the case, we need to focus attention on reform of the Federal Reserve System. It's popular right now (and has been, with varying degrees of intensity, since the Crash of 1929) to characterize the Federal Reserve as some kind of anti-American plot, and to demand that it be abolished or, at the very least, prevented from doing the very job that it was designed to do: provide adequate liquidity to the private sector for industrial, commercial, and agricultural development by supplying the country with a "flexible currency" that would expand and shrink directly with the needs of business, thereby avoiding both inflation and deflation, as well as concentrated control of the money power in private hands or the State. (How the Federal Reserve was diverted from its primary mission is a long and tedious story that we hope to relate in a future series of postings.)

In order to focus on the Federal Reserve and encourage people to show up at the peaceful demonstration outside the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC on April 15, 2010, we need a slogan or two to grab people's attention. Today's posting is one possibility that (at least in our opinion) seems to do the job:

"EVERY CITIZEN AN OWNER"

Dawn K. Brohawn, Guest Blogger

• "Every Citizen an Owner" states the economic counterpart to "One Person, One Vote". Whereas citizenship is an expression of political empowerment, ownership is an expression of economic empowerment.

• "Every Citizen an Owner" is the economic goal of "Capital Homesteading by 2012". The Capital Homestead Act would enable every person in society to become an owner of productive capital.

• This slogan gives us a starting point for explaining how Capital Homesteading would benefit every person. ("A capital homestead would provide you, as an owner, a second income." "Ownership through capital homesteading gives you and every other citizen a personal stake in the green growth frontier.")

• Citizenship and ownership are the twin ("binary") components of human sovereignty, which is essential to justice, democracy and freedom. "Every Citizen an Owner" expresses what binary economics and the Just Third Way means to each person, in terms of power. ("Own or be Owned.")

• "Every Citizen an Owner" is another way of expressing equality of access, equality of opportunity and equality of status.

• We can relate this idea to Lincoln's vision and the Homestead Act as a national economic agenda for unifying and developing America. It expresses Lincoln's belief that we don't have to make the rich man poor in order to make the poor man rich. Our economic plan for the 21st Century can unify all members of society.

• If every citizen were able to acquire a capital homestead (financed through Fed-created money and interest-free credit for broadly owned private-sector growth), we could have "full production, full employment, full ownership and full empowerment."

• It reinforces the idea that political democracy can't function without economic democracy. Power must start with each citizen.

• We can relate this slogan to the idea of "Own the Fed" as well as "Own a Share of the Growth Frontier"

• "Every Citizen an Owner" offers a new foreign policy objective for America and global vision for peace, prosperity and justice. It provides a completely new direction for establishing just and growing economies in places like Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Since we were looking for a "hook phrase" to accompany our rally's call for "Capital Homesteading by 2012!", I would like to get the support from our group to use this phrase in marketing our April Events. I think it helps pull together the objectives and themes of the three April gatherings, and I believe it offers a useful launch point for an elevator speech on Capital Homesteading and why we're rallying at the Federal Reserve.

Many thanks to a great group of independent yet united thinkers.

If we want to work peacefully to reform our institutions, we have to understand and articulate the reason why we think those institutions need reforming. The slogan, "Every Citizen an Owner," while it doesn't "say it all" (what slogan could?) does convey the essence of what we hope to accomplish — especially by 2012, the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862.

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