Law professor Robert Ashford offers a solution to our core economic problem of eroding wages combined with increasing concentration of wealth and income at the top.
The idea is how to make everyone who labors not just a worker, but also a capitalist.
What makes Ashford’s approach fascinating is that it does not require taxes to redistribute wealth, it encourages capital investment, it promotes business profits and it aligns neatly with requirements for a successful democracy.
Consider a poor man who hauls sacks of grain for a living. If he can save up and buy a donkey he can carry much more grain. That donkey is his capital. With the increased earnings from this capital the man can acquire a cart, then a truck and eventually build a short-haul railroad, all the while prospering as capital performs more and more labor.
The more the man has, the more he can consume, his mud hut being replaced by a house and other signs of prosperity all made possible by acquiring more and more capital with the earnings of his capital.
The trick, of course, is to acquire your first capital and then use it to acquire more and more capital.
By Mosab Saad Mohammed Ahmed
August 4, 2016