Two assumptions that many people
take for granted is that “economic scarcity” means that human wants and needs
can never, ever be satisfied, and that the only way to finance new capital
formation is to reduce wants and needs in order to have the wherewithal to do
so.
Both assumptions are wrong. First, economic scarcity only means that at
any specific point in time, a specific quantity of anything exists, and — at
that point in time — you cannot use the same resource in two different
ways. It says nothing about whether
there is enough of that resource to meet demand for it, or doing more with
less, or finding substitutes if demand is greater than the supply.
No, it just means that a resource
cannot be more than it is, and it can’t be in two places at the same time. (The philosophical equivalent is the
principle of contradiction/identity.) As
for the presumption that human wants and needs can never be satisfied, the
whole theory of marginal utility assumes that, yes, you can be satisfied. You will just be less satisfied with each
additional unit of whatever you’re using to satisfy yourself until you reach
zero satisfaction, and adding any more will result in negative utility.
Countering this sort of thing, Kelso's second book in 1961 with Adler was subtitled "A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of [Past] Savings." It was based on Kelso's "pure credit" concepts for financing sustainable and ecologically sound growth.
Countering this sort of thing, Kelso's second book in 1961 with Adler was subtitled "A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of [Past] Savings." It was based on Kelso's "pure credit" concepts for financing sustainable and ecologically sound growth.
This would allow every market
economy to grow in a sustainable manner with productive credit and asset-backed
money with assets that pay for themselves out of "future savings"
from the earnings of capital. Such "leveraged financing" for turning
propertyless workers into owners is now working in thousands of U.S. companies
following U.S. laws encouraging leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plans or
"ESOPs", a financing tool invented by Kelso in the 1950s.
Kelso’s invention of the ESOP
allowed millions of workers to become capital owners without risking a cent of
past savings or reducing consumption.
The question then becomes, “Where do we go from here?”
Kelso's broader Just Third Way
global vision would provide equal opportunity for every citizen to become a
shareowner of productive capital assets.
This would include rentable land and natural resources, ever-advancing
technologies, including labor-displacing robotics, rentable space,
infrastructure, new energy systems, patents, etc.
Access to the means of acquiring
and possessing private property in capital would finally be recognized as a realizable
fundamental human right as stated in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.
