As we saw
yesterday, ordinary people who own no capital and have only their labor to sell
are, in a modern industrial economy, ground between the upper and nether
millstones of inability to produce enough with labor in competition with
advancing technology to meet the consumption needs of themselves and those
dependent on them, and an even greater inability to acquire and possess the
technology that is making it virtually impossible for them to meet their own
needs through their own efforts.
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| Non-owners are basically ... well, you know. |
The obvious
solution (and one that has been known for a few thousand years or so) is that
for a worker to be a full member of the community he or she can’t just be a
fungible provider of labor for others to buy, or a non-producer sucking away
goods and services that others produced for their own benefit. No, a worker must also be an owner or (as
Aristotle put it) he or she is nothing but a slave without a master, and much
worse off than an actual owned slave who — as property of a master “shares” the
life, status, and prestige of that master.
Big deal.
Well, . . . yes,
a big deal. Participation in the life of
the community — the politikos bios —
requires that people have status equal to that of others in the community. A non-owner simply does not have equal status
with an owner, and that’s that.
Yes, the State
can make laws forcing equality of status, but there’s nothing behind that
“equality” except the State’s coercive power.
Take that away, and non-owners immediately lose status and thus
equality.
The bottom
line? If you want a truly politically
democratic society, you’d better have a truly economically democratic
society. Otherwise you’re just biding
time until owners of property seize all power, or non-owners decide to divvy up
what belongs to others; “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”
The issue, then,
is how ordinary people who have no savings and no (or virtually no) capacity to
save the amounts required to purchase increasingly expensive technology can
purchase the capital instruments that are making it impossible for them to be
productive . . . and thus unable to save . . . .
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| Kelso: "Every person an owner? What's wrong with that?" |
This is the
problem Louis O. Kelso addressed with the invention of the Employee Stock
Ownership Plan, or ESOP. By means of an
ESOP, workers can purchase all or part of the company that employs them. This is not by using their existing savings
(if any), or by taking cuts in pay or benefits.
Instead, the
workers do what the rich have done for millennia. That is, they buy the company on credit, and
pay for it out of the future profits of the company itself.
The problem is
that the ESOP only covers workers in for-profit corporations . . . and then
only if the company sponsors an ESOP.
What about all the people who don’t work for companies with ESOPs, or
who aren’t even employed?
Kelso had that
covered, too. His vision was to enable
every child, woman, and man to purchase capital instruments on credit, and pay
for them out of the future profits of the instruments themselves. They could then use the income to meet
consumption needs.
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| Say: "Make my law work again." |
In this way,
every consumer would be a producer, and every producer, a consumer. By financing all new capital instruments
using new money created for just that purpose, and ensuring that new money was
created for new capital only in ways that would create equally new owners of
that capital, production and consumption would come back into balance, and
Say’s Law would function again.
Freed from the
presumed necessity to produce more than is consumed, people could reorient
their lives to improving themselves as human beings, rather than improving the
bottom line out of fear for the future.
CESJ has designed
a proposal called Capital Homesteading that we think will bring about Kelso’s “ownership
revolution,” and without redistribution or redefining ownership. It’s worth looking into, and can be found in
great detail on the CESJ website.
Is this a
Utopia? Hardly. People will still have to work, and work
hard. It’s hard for some people to
realize it, but being an owner can be harder work than simply following someone
else’s orders. All of a sudden you’re
the one responsible for what goes on, not some capitalist or bureaucrat a
thousand miles away. You are the one who
has to act like an adult.
Now, that might
scare some people, but as things improve, people will realize that they’d
rather be independent adult owners, than dependents owned by someone else. It’s a lot more fun, for one thing. It’s also a lot nicer.
#30#
