1 Aug 2007 01:05
Peter Barnes, a "modern" defender of inequality
Spinning off the discussion of Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes from another thread: Barnes' basic device is to increase rents (in the technical economic sense) and spread them around. He makes the rents attractive by putting prices on aspects of nature, as he says, and even on advertising clutter. Although Barnes sprinkles around occasional rhetorical allusions to inequality, he is actually tries to firm up the wage relation with all its inevitable inequality. "Argument: Paying dividends to everyone would undermine the work ethic. Counterargument: This might be true if the dividends were very high, but is unlikely to be true if they're kept at a modest level. Such dividends would supplement, but not replace, labor income." (p. 116) Barnes wants to tie wage earners to their exploitation by making them dependent on healthy corporate profits for the last 10 percent or so of their income, much as advocates of "pension capitalism" agitated for about 30 years ago: "Eventually, when a post-carbon infrastructure is built, carbon emissions would stabilize at a low level, and so would this revenue source for the American Permanent Fund. By this time, the second revenue source--dividends from holding a portion of publicly traded corporate shares--would kick in. This revenue source would give every citizen a stake in increasing corporate profits, just as the first source gives them a stake in decreasing pollution. Who could object to that combination?" (p. 144) As a working hypothesis, I recommend a healthy suspicion that the more(Continue reading)
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