Ideas For Democracy:  Goal #13

Investments and money games, investment gambling.

 

Citizens who want real democracy will actively support this policy and vote for trustworthy candidates who actively support this policy.

 

IFD - policy:  Investing is an act for the public good.  To offer money dedicated to a useful purpose is an act of hope for the future and faith in the people and a business plan designed to meet a public need.  The original purpose of enabling people in business to form a corporation is part of our history.  One purpose was to protect individual owners and managers from being held personally responsible for acts or omissions that were actually committed by group decisions and group direction.  Another was to continue the operation of the business with minimal interruptions and changes in its productivity and reliability when the founder or founders were no longer available to direct the business activity.  Another important purpose was to allow for many investors to provide their experience and their money in support of business ventures that required a lot of expenses, also known as "capital."  The natural conditions for a business venture idea searching for capital support was what we now call "investing," which is in fact a form of gambling.  It is gambling on the success and outcome of the venture, which in some cases is an entirely new type of business, or a business providing a new product or new service where the probability of success is difficult to measure.  The money made available for new businesses based on new ideas is often called "venture capital" and it is probably not an accident that "venture" looks like the word "adventure" which some investors believe is a good name for a new business.  As the modern business corporation evolved, it quickly became a means for people with excess money, and perhaps with a desire to avoid real work, found that this form of positive social gambling (betting on a business venture) was both fun and profitable.  These people, still called "investors," developed the concept that the true and sole purpose of a business corporation is to earn a profit for the investors.  As the company evolves and becomes more and more successful, growing in "market share" and stability and profit margins, the value of a stock or share of stock in the company goes up.  Therefore, the earnings of a share of stock are not fixed at a pre-established interest rate, but can be much higher than the interest rates charged on a bank loan.  Sometimes a company's stock value increases by 50% or 100% or even more over a period of two to five years.  The ultimate development in the expectations of an American business corporation was established by the Supreme Court in 1919.  Henry Ford, inventor and founder of the Ford Motor Company, decided to pay his workers a higher daily wage even though he and any accountant could see that his decision to pay his employees more would reduce the profit margin for those who owned stocks in the Ford Motor Company, Incorporated.  The stock holders sued on the grounds that by raising wages on his own, Ford had committed a "breach of fiduciary responsibility," that fiduciary responsibility being that as manager of the corporation, his primary duty was to earn the highest profits for the trustees or stockholders of the corporation.  In other words, having become a public corporation, he no longer exercised the power of a sole owner.  The investors really owned the corporation, and he was their servant in their venture and their venture was to make the highest possible profit.  There is a presumption that earning the highest possible profit is to be accomplished within the boundaries of the law and a duty to avoid harm to members of the community.  Having lost control over his enterprise, this may be the reason Ford allegedly became an angry man as he aged.

 

Later evolution of the business corporation:

After the disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II, the modern corporation moved further from the concept of existing to meet a public need, or demand, to existing for the enjoyment of the investor gamblers who played with money and love the concept that they can make a profit using other people's money and exploiting other people's labor.  In a tribal society, people who tried to do what investors do would be executed. 

 

But good gamblers who bet on business ventures, and who also bet in the spring on the probable value of a pork belly or a bushel of corn in July or September, do benefit society.  They enable us to maintain a fairly reliable system for measuring the health and stability of business entities and the market prices for virtually everything.  The pegged value or price of a public stock in the open market (the stock exchange) is a measure of the value of that business entity.  Some stock values are as reliable as the water flow in certain rivers.  But serious problems for society have developed out of the stock market and the oddly destructive thought that developed in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century:  the strangely contradictory concept that a corporation has, or should have, the same civil rights as a living flesh and blood person.  In the "Citizens United" decision (January 2010), the Supreme Court ruled that a business corporation had a right of "free speech" and can exercise that right of speech by giving unlimited monetary contributions to candidates for elective legislative office (State and Federal).  This shocked people because it is so obviously the opposite of the original concept of the corporation as a "legal fiction."  Therefore, the corporation started as a legal fiction and evolved to become a person with the rights of a person to demand that a legislator make laws, or not make laws, as the corporation so desires.  This relationship between a corporation and a legislator is viewed by most people, justifiably, as open bribery.  The corporation makes the claim that they, having provided huge sums of money, are responsible for the legislator having gotten elected to their legislative office.  Therefore, as a logical and fair reciprocation, the legislator owes a debt of loyalty to the corporation, and demonstrates that loyalty by legislating according to the stated interests of the corporation. 

 

Hire a legislator is now a customary business expense:

What this means in actual real-world practice, is that the legislative elections in the United States of America have become an opportunity for those whose priority is to make a monetary profit -- the investors who own a corporation -- can hire a person to run for legislative office so that when elected that legislator can then represent the selfish and narrow interests of the corporation, and the constituents who voted for the candidate to get him elected are left out in the cold.  It is like saying that the Congress and the State Legislatures have been taken from the people, for whom the Constitution was written, and sold the legislative power to corporate buyers.  This outcome is as contrary to the intent of the American Revolution and the Constitution as one could possibly be.  It is a return to the conditions of medieval European royal rule and the power of the nobility over the masses that applied before the American Revolution and the French Revolution and Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.  To call this process "corruption" is really unnecessarily polite.  It is actually the American Revolution in reverse.  It is the radical and open destruction of a democratic process where legislators are elected by people to represent the best interests of those people.  To represent the selfish and narrow interests of a corporation or a set of corporations is betrayal.  It is extremely dangerous and has the potential to trigger public violence against the institutions of government because the governing process has strayed disastrously far from its original democratic purpose.

 

The best way to remedy this monstrous betrayal of democracy is to make lobbying illegal and to make campaign contributions from business entities illegal.  That is both fair and logical.  Corporations do not have a Constitution.  Corporations did not fight for freedom in the Revolutionary War and they did not sit down and write fundamental rules for the organization and behavior of corporations.  The concept that a corporation is a person is so blatantly illogical and destructive it has to be erased from the public mind.  To say that a corporation is a person with personal or civil rights is like saying that a machine is a person with personal rights.  The corporation is a machine, a machine designed to enable investors to control business activities, but not enable them to control society.

       

To protect the best interests of society, and of all the individual citizens who pay all of the bills and who are the source of all monetary value, investment gambling should be carefully regulated and taxed to ensure that the processes of the stock exchange serve the purposes of a just and healthy and democratic society.  The active principle in addressing this issue is that the people control the money, and the money does not control the people.

 

 

Why Capitalists Fear the Ideas of Karl Marx

I read "On Capital" long ago, when I was in high school.  I also subscribed to the magazine that had articles that painted a glowing picture of life in Russia.  I wanted to understand the viewpoint of competing ideas.  The problem was that I know the Soviet Union was not a communist or communal society.  The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was imitating the authoritarian and rigid tyranny of the German Nationalist Party. 

Americans are misinformed on what Marx said in this famous book on "political economy."  First, his thought is not European Socialism.  In fact, the experience he was responding to was his observation of working conditions in the state of New York in the nineteenth century.  Those conditions included child labor, ten and twelve-hour days, and no benefits or insurance of any kind that American workers fought for later and gained during the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.  Marx also had observed factories in Great Britain, including the famous mills of Lancaster and heavy industry in Liverpool.

 

Marx said a lot in his book, and it is a tragedy of history that he was attacked by the noble class of America and Europe, with what were essentially deception, distraction and misdirection.  The noble oppressors have relied on the cynical use of religion and disinformation for centuries.  The two main distractions they use to discredit Marx is that he was an atheist and that he proposed strict centralized control as the best form of government.  Neither of these accusations is true.  First, whether or not he believed in God, he believed in social justice, which places him in the company of Jesus.  Much of Marx's work is critical of the capitalist employers because of the harsh and unfair working conditions they imposed on their employees.  Employment in industry, in America, during the nineteenth century was a lot like slavery.  Essentially what had happened is that families who had previously owned farms lost their property and were displaced by the process that we call the industrial revolution.  By leaving the land and working in factories they lost their traditional source of security, the small farms that enabled them to feed themselves.  Having no land and becoming dependent on their industrial employers for income, they were trapped -- but not entirely helpless.  They started the movement to establish labor rights, labor unions, and all of those working conditions that led to the development of the middle class in America.  Marx's criticism of oppressive working conditions would be accepted as completely logical and fair today.  His motivation was social justice, and his drive was to understand how the capitalist system led to the extreme outcome that he observed in industrial society.  There were some good results, such as more goods being produced in a shorter period of time:  shoes, clothing, tools, furniture, machines, medicines, even preserved foods.  All that materialism was good, according to Marx and Engels who believed in materialism.  For them, materialism did not mean to discredit religion or morality, but meant to see the customs and laws of society as arising out of economic conditions rather than out of religion.

 

We westerners still talk with certainty that our laws and customs are derived from the Ten Commandments and the Christian Bible, but an historical materialist sees the world differently.  Marx and Engels wrote about a viewpoint or discipline proposed to enable people to better understand the intellectual sources of our culture.  They argued that economics came first, not religion, and they argued that the laws and customs and belief systems of a culture grew out of the people's economic life.  Even religious beliefs are the result of economics, according to this viewpoint called "dialectical materialism."  The part of the Christian religion that could be the result of a capitalist or oppressive society would be the part that says morality requires workers to be obedient and passive, accept your lot in life because it is the will of God, and do not be rebellious or violent.  It is wrong to fight for improvement in your material conditions.  This pseudo "religious" viewpoint that discredits the employees in an industrial society continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  It is so insidious and evil in our current period that capitalists and the Republican Party in the United States accuse the workers of American Society of being poor because they are stupid and lazy.  The real reason American workers are descending into poverty is because the Industrial Revolution has succeeded, meaning that capitalists and their industries have been successful in their drive, over the past three centuries, to replace human workers with machines, including computer controlled robots.  The Industrial Revolution is not bad.  The original purpose of the industrial revolution was to liberate humankind from the burdens of harsh labor, and to support a scientific society that would find cures for diseases and develop better ways to cope with the challenges of climate and natural disasters.  But this is only the background of how the views of Karl Marx got the capitalists very upset and pathologically defensive. 

 

The workers produce the "value" that results from industrial production:

Marx said something critical about the capitalist system that terrifies the capitalists, the industrialists and the investors on Wall Street.  What Marx said was that they did not produce anything of value, and that "value" or economic productivity, or what is called "added value" is the process of turning raw materials into finished products, was all the result of the labor of the workers.  We start with basic raw materials, such as iron ore or vegetable fibers (cotton), and then over the course of an industrial process the raw material is transformed into a useful product (nails or clothing) that meets a human need.  This production process is essentially the same for everything that we manufacture.  The manufacturing process became faster, better, more uniform, more machine driven, as the industrialization of society moves forward.  This process makes material goods cheaper, and the rise of the machine age continued to replace human labor with machine production and then "automated" production.  The common social interaction of buying a sandwich from a human vendor could be transformed by a customer making their purchase from a "vending machine."  Instead of milking the family cow, people went to supermarkets to buy milk in a bottle, then in a carton, then further still traditional foods were replaced with imitation foods such as white bread, instant pudding, and American cheese.  Heading into the twenty-first century food in the United States is divided up into label categories that are not always reliable:  natural, fresh produce, organic, grade A, premium, and so forth, and many food products in cans and in boxes might not even qualify as real food in a traditional culture.   The modern supermarket or department store is more like a warehouse maintained by a minimal low-paid workforce.  This is another area, distribution of goods, where what we call the "industrial revolution" could be called the "human worker replacement revolution."  We like it when we go shopping, but we don't like being unemployed.

 

The capitalists are job destroyers:

The capitalists are pathological in their determination to discredit socialism and persuade the working populace that capitalists are the source of national wealth.  In the twenty-first century, they have resorted to calling themselves the "job creators," which is hilarious, because the most characteristic activity of capitalists is to eliminate jobs for humans.  Their reason for existing, their main purpose (remember "breach of fiduciary responsibility") is to maximize profits and the unfortunate capitalists are the best evidence that Marx's and Engels' materialism works as described:  the economic conditions of capitalists compels them to create their own religious myth, the myth that they create jobs.  Anyone who studies economics, even at the most simple or basic level, knows immediately that all employment is created by a human need or what economists call "demand."  In other words, if people want something, AND if they have the money to pay for it, then that demand has to be met, according to the field of knowledge that we call "economics."  Therefore, in order to meet that demand, one of our investment gamblers calculates the cost of meeting that demand (for sneakers or cell phones or hot dogs or cookies), and then the market price that will produce sales, and the profit that will result, so long as the cost of the human labor required can be kept under control.  So the way our economy, and all economies, really work is not that capitalists create jobs, but human demand creates an opportunity to produce what is demanded and earn a profit, and the usual and customary way to earn a profit in a capitalist society is to hire human labor and exploit that labor.  The capitalist hires production supervisors, engineers and managers in addition to ordinary workers.  All this results in wages for the workers and profits for the investors.  But Marx says the capitalist himself, or herself, just brings money to the project, and an expectation of profit, but does not produce any of the "added value" that is the economic outcome of industrial production -- including agricultural industry production.  All of the added value is produced by the human workers, and the capitalist just sits on his ass and rakes in a profit.  THAT is the thing that Marx said that the capitalist does not what you to hear.  So, the capitalist says don't be an atheist and don't read anything written or said by Karl Marx.  He was immoral and his ideas will turn you into a prostitute or a zombie, or a homosexual drug addict zombie.  Go to church and be happy with what you've got, which is all a gift from the rich capitalist, who is rich because he is good, and smart, and loves God.  Hope you are beginning to see that if you work for a living Karl Marx is one of the best friends you ever had.  Marx did not want workers to attack and kill capitalists.  He just wanted regulations to make the system more fair and more just.  That is why the Republican Party, which is controlled by capitalists who hire people to run for legislative office,  so that your belief system will be the opposite of rational thought and you will believe that capitalists create jobs and workers are stupid and lazy and immoral and just need to be obedient and work harder, work at more than one job, so that God will be happy with their compliant and submissive behavior.   That is why capitalists and Republicans hate Karl Marx, because they hate economic justice and the logical observations that Marx made about how a capitalist economy works:  the workers work and produce the goods that result from industrial production and the capitalist gambles and parties.  It is easy to see why the capitalists don't like Karl Marx.  It is not really because he was an atheist; it is because he criticized them for being the lazy parasites that they are.  Some capitalists try to make our system yield greater economic justice, but their success is difficult to measure.  Karl Marx was probably basically a good man whose only offense was that when he studied our economic system he found injustices that he felt compelled to describe and explain.  He actually did a good job.  If you look at society with an open mind, you will see that Marx and Engels made an important point, the capitalists are similar to the slave owners of the Confederate South.  They both present excellent examples of "dialectical materialism."  They both create their religious beliefs in defense of an economic system that enables them to profit without doing any real work.