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Friday, August 12, 2011
It is WE, THE PEOPLE who are the job creators.
No man is an island, someone said and one could easily imagine what those at the very top at the food chain, those in the pinnacle of the pecking order would encounter should they be stranded on a desert island. Why, they would be mere mortals, pathetic, helpless human beings without even the ability to survive, that is what.
No matter how innovative, how industrious, how ambitious these top of the heap folks are, they need the masses; they need those below to provide them with the labor, the efforts and the purchasing power to buy whatever the hell they are selling or renting.
This too is a factor: those at the very top find it convenient to imagine themselves somehow superior, above the law, entitled and worthy; it is a malaise that affects most wealthy folks and in a way, it is the instrument by which they find validation.
There are countless books and a myriad of theorists who describe and define what and who are the job creators, who and what is CAPITALISM and 
most have some poignant and applicable merit. There are also “schools” of thought and “followers” of a certain economic formula.
For example: Adam Smith in his "The Wealth of Nations" says that workers are the engine for growth. Conversely, Andrew Carnegie's perspective on who makes capitalism work in his essay "The Gospel of Wealth." deciphers how it was that human beings found it advantageous to adopt a free completion (FREE ENTERPRISE) model. It is what separates the men from the boys or the drones from the bees. Carnegie was of the notion that such individuals were crucial to the development of society and the creation of 
prosperity albeit there might exist inequalities.
We have someone a bit more radical and less pragmatic in the person of Ayn Rand in her aptly titled "What Is Capitalism? that basically tells us that those at the top are the exceptional minority, the ones who lift the rest of society upward and those who contribute all…as opposed to the masses that contribute nothing. This of course is not just a flawed concept but a very perverse one. Unfortunately some of our politicians adhere to it…Ronald Reagan believed that, being one of the firsts who actually got to be in power.
Thus we get to Keynesian Economics, which is an an economic theory stating that active government intervention in the marketplace and monetary policy is the best method of ensuring economic growth and stability. Investopedia explains Keynesian Economics. A supporter of Keynesian economics believes it is the government's job to smooth out the bumps in business cycles. Intervention would come in the form of government spending and tax breaks in order to stimulate the economy, and government spending cuts and tax hikes in good times, in order to curb inflation.
Which brings me to one very important point, that is the natural monopolies that should not have a right to exist in the hands of private enterprise because if given the chance these so called “job creators, entrepreneurs, capitalists” will use the exclusivity, the lack of competition of a given sector to exact an unreasonable profit from it. We can think of some very obvious examples like electric companies, water and sewer, health care and others. It is because this feature of exclusivity and monopoly that we have as a society agreed that they should not be in private hands. Put another way: could you picture ten different power companies all running their own power grid? The wires on the post behind your house would look like 100 spider webs melded together. Or, could you have 5 water and sewer entities in one community? Surely the tearing of streets to lay down pipes would be nightmarish.
We have also other concerns that could not possibly be relegated to the private sector like the military or the social safety nets. Surely health insurance and healthcare figure high in the priority list as the need for medical care is everyone’s concern and most people at one point or another in their lives will need it. But it would be outrageous to say that what we have in place now is anything but sane. It is a fact that America as one of the wealthiest of the industrialized nations provides much poorer health care than other countries at a much higher cost than they do. The health care of people can’t be surrendered to insurance companies because they serve no purpose, they provide no services or even innovation…they merely exist for the purpose of making a profit, which in my view makes them parasites. They don’t even deserve to be on the top of that heap, that food chain.
Returning to our original message that it is the masses that creates jobs we find it peculiarly suspect that those very people who are forcing incredible privileges that exempts them from paying taxes are those who are hoarding the wealth and whenever they create jobs they do so in another country where labor is cheaper and regulations non-existent.
SOURCES: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp#axzz1UZHWLOYR
Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp#ixzz1UZI6H4l0
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/08/08/adam_smith_tea_party/index.html
PHOTO SOURCES: http://vietnamesegod.blogspot.com/2007/11/electricity.html
http://www.leadership-with-you.com/andrew-carnegie-leadership.html
http://aynrand-ithacanewyork.latinadanza.com/
