As the lockdown, shutdown, quarantine,
or whatever you want to call it continues, so does the scarcity of real and
workable ideas on what to do about it.
For example:
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| Louis Kelso: "Told you so . . . fifty years ago." |
• Corona Job Losses. According
to reports, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida have been hit hardest by the wave
of sudden unemployment, now “officially” up to 14.7%. Of the approximately 33 million jobs “lost,”
by far the most have come in those three states. Not surprisingly, these are also states that
have experienced rapid growth over the past ten years . . . but did so in ways
that in general did not allow as many people as possible to participate fully
in that growth as workers, consumers, and owners of the new capital. Had more of the growth been focused on
financing in ways that broadened ownership of advanced technology, not only
would workers and former workers be able to derive income from ownership when
they can no longer work, but production would have continued as advanced
technologies usually require substantially less human input and sometimes none
at all. As Louis Kelso pointed out over
half a century ago, whether a human being earns income by producing with his or
her labor, or owns the machine that produces, the human being is still going to
get the income, which will keep the economy running both on the production side
and the consumption side, as described in the short paper, “Universalizing
Capital Ownership.”
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| Bernie Sanders: "Forget what I said about worker ownership." |
• Free Money for All? Why Not Capital Credit for All? As reported in the Huffington Post (“New
Bill Would Give Americans $2,000 Per Month Until Coronavirus Pandemic Is Over”), a proposed bill in Congress would . . .
well, hand out $2,000 monthly to folks to help out in this time of crisis . . .
and make them dependent on the federal government. As stated in the article, “The Monthly
Economic Crisis Support Act, introduced Friday by Sens. Kamala Harris
(D-Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would provide a
monthly $2,000 check to every person with an income below $120,000 throughout
the public health crisis and for three months after it officially ends.” Of course, who is to say when something “officially
ends”? . . . but that’s not what we’re questioning . . . okay, we’re
questioning that, as well as wondering where the money is supposed to come
from, but we’re also wondering why CESJ’s proposed “Capital Homestead Act”
that originally suggested $3,000 (up to $7-12,000 now, why be stingy?) in
capital credit extended in a non-inflationary way to allow people without
savings to purchase newly formed capital and become productive without past
savings (Capital Homesteading uses “future savings”) isn’t being
discussed. After all, if you’re really
interested in putting the economy on a sound footing, doesn’t it make sense for
every child, woman, and man to participate to the fullest extent possible as producer,
consumer, and owner?
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| What pops into our heads when we hear "the Jobs Market." |
• Jobs are Down, the Dow is Up. It is not clear to us just how or why the
worse the “Jobs Market” gets, the higher the stock market rises. As far as we know, there are only two direct
factors of production, labor and capital.
If someone cannot produce (or produce enough) with his or her labor,
logic dictates that he or she must produce with capital or be forced to rely on
charity or theft (with a nod to redistribution as an allowed expedient in an
emergency, but not as a usual thing).
Rises in the stock market as increasing numbers of people become
non-productive seems to be rooted in the rather bizarre notion that stock
market price changes represent changes in real wealth. No, they represent changes in the prices
people are willing to pay for the symbols of ownership of wealth, i.e.,
debt and equity instruments representing the assets and liabilities of the
issuing institutions. That is why the
stock market is called a “secondary market.”
The primary market is a term applied to two things, 1) the private
sector companies and individuals engaged in producing and consuming marketable
goods and services, and 2) institutions making new (“primary”) issues of debt
and equity. In regard to the latter,
every new issue of either debt or equity in which the issuer gets the money is
a “primary issue,” while debt and equity instruments that are resold are “secondary
issues.” The primary market gets the
issuer the money, but the issuer never sees a cent more regardless how high the
price of an issue goes once it’s out in the market.
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| "Use Amazon Smile . . . Blah, Blah!" |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice Arlington.” If you type anything else, you will either
get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 32 different
countries and 37 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, Spain,
the United Kingdom,, and Indonesia. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “How
Commercial Banks Create Money,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 18,” “Possible
Steps to Restart the Economy,” “The
Unacknowledged Right,” and “Social
Justice, IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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