Bernie Sanders has announced that he has a
twelve-point economic plan to break the power of the Koch brothers and
other financial oligarchs, and restore prosperity to America. Nice try, Hon. B. Sanders, but from a Just Third
Way perspective and the logic of Say’s Law of Markets, you’re going about it
the wrong way, even backwards.
Frankly, given pure credit (i.e., credit based on financial feasibility and extended without
regard to existing accumulations of wealth) and capital credit insurance and
reinsurance to replace traditional forms of collateral, the rich become
superfluous for all practical purposes.
Once you realize that ordinary people can become capital owners without
using somebody else’s past savings, and generate their own consumption income
by becoming productive through capital ownership in addition to or instead of
labor, a whole new world opens up.
It’s not how much the Kochs or anybody else have. It’s how much everybody else has the
opportunity and means to produce and acquire. If I have enough, it shouldn’t matter to me
how much more you have.
Redistributing existing wealth as a solution instead of as
an expedient on the way to a solution is a mug’s game. Want to upset the rich and powerful . . . and
those who think they want to be rich and powerful? Let them know that you want to take it all
away. You don’t think they’ll resist?
If “Backwards Bernie” wants to benefit humanity (and his
constituency), he should advocate a program of expanded ownership for the many,
not divestiture of ownership for the few.
The rich and powerful might even go along with something like that. After all, the conservative schtick is that
ownership and wealth are Good Things.
We’re not even asking them to put their money where their
mouths are. We’re asking them to help us
put our money where their mouths
are. They risk nothing, and get to keep
what they have. We risk almost nothing
(capital credit insurance and reinsurance, remember?), and gain something for
ourselves that costs the rich nothing.
Fortunately, we happen to have a program ready. All it takes is a few (hundred thousand)
people to tell the Hon. Sanders (or some other mover and shaker) that it’s
available, and can be implemented with only a relatively few changes in current
law.
It’s called “Capital Homesteading.” If you haven’t heard of it, maybe it’s time
you did. If you have heard of it, maybe
it’s time to let others — like Bernie Sanders — in on the secret.