Union leaders are waiting for capitalism to bite hard. Then they’ll make their come-back. And capitalism is already biting. It is in capitalism’s nature – greed – to bite. That’s why Socialists are waiting for just a little more greed. When things get real hard for the masses, they’ll strike again. From a strategic point of view, they should refrain from trying to bridle capital at this moment. The less they temper, the sooner conditions will be right for them.
Then Socialism will be back in town. And with it big government, coerced redistribution (either Cuba-style, or more benign welfare-style) and loss of basic freedoms. Socialism is based on envy and hate. The masses have to hate the rich and nobody is allowed to own capital. For if you own capital, you cannot be a good socialist. All this results in egalitarian poverty enforced by brute force (e.g. Cuba with Venezuela beginning to follow this lead).
Chavez has a lot of support
Chavez has a lot of support, both at home and abroad. This should not surprise us, because the Venezuelan masses are very poor. They love a president who gives them alms. And the poor are justifiably indignant at the incredible discrepancy that exists between haves and have-nots. This discrepancy is clearly unjust and our refusal to acknowledge this is a guarantee for trouble. The injustice will grow, until the poor take up arms again to redistribute wealth (by stealing it from the rich). Only to find out later that everybody is poor again and then has to be kept poor forcibly.
Now, Hugo Chavez knows this. But he has considered his options and has chosen socialism, because capitalism has lead to poverty and exploitation of the masses and he sees no third way. So it is: ‘Socialism or death’ all over again. And this will not stop with Chavez. Other socialists will rise up again and again until we acknowledge that the exaggerated discrepancy between rich and poor is unjust and we have decided to do something serious about it.
The remedy is simple
The remedy is simple and has been around for almost 50 years, but has remained mostly unnoticed. People are pretty blind when it comes to ideology or religion. It blinds them to other options. We have to firstly acknowledge that poverty is a crime. There is no justification for the fact that 1% to 5% of the populations owns and earns more than 95% of the rest combined.
And secondly, we have to acknowledge that socialism (= the means of production in the hands of the State) did not work and cannot work to solve this. Therefore we have no other choice but to embrace a new economic system. We have to make sure the masses will not only receive at least a living wage, but also (on top of that) enough productive capital to guarantee them a good life. In other words, we have to place the means of production in the hands of the masses. Not the State, but the individual citizens. We have to diffuse ownership of productive capital. This is the ‘just third way’ (also referred to as ‘economic democracy’), worked out by Louis Kelso.
Creation out of thin air
Now, the first question raised about this by one of our readers is: ‘OK, but how are you going to accomplish that?’ The answer again is quite simple (once you know it). Natural resources are the property of all people. Any and all income from natural resources could be used to buy productive capital for the people. That means that everybody will get a personal account from birth in his personal name to receive his personal share of income from natural resources. With this money stock, shares and other ownership instruments in companies (operating the means of production) can be bought.
Secondly, the Central Bank can and does create money ‘out of thin air’. It does this all the time. As long as that money is used to form productive capital (shares in companies, bought either on credit or in cash) the creation of money does not cause inflation. The government can therefore use created funds to capitalize the capital-less. How all this can be worked out in detail, takes more text to explain than we have in these short articles. For more info we refer to www.cesj.org
Today’s video is an explanation of Kelso’s binary economic theory by an anthropologist and how this theory can help conquer poverty. It’s a long video, but certainly interesting. On the basis of Biblical quotations the person interviewed (Dr. Sidney M. Greenfield) tries to get the fundamentalist Christians to see the logic of binary economics.