On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else. A way toward that goal could be found by associating labor with the ownership of capital joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labor, etc.
The Church's teaching on ownership diverges radically from collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and "rigid" capitalism. The primacy of the person over things joint ownership of the means of work.
The basis of self-ownership is the fact that each person has direct control over the scarce resource of his body and therefore has a better claim to it than any third party (and any third party seeking to dispute my self-ownership must presuppose the principle of self-ownership in the first place since he is acting as a self-owner).
Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.
There are but three political-economic roads from which we can choose... We could take the first course and further exacerbate the already concentrated ownership of productive capital in the American economy. Or we could join the rest of the world by taking the second path, that of nationalization. Or we can take the third road, establishing policies to diffuse capital ownership broadly, so that many individuals, particularly workers, can participate as owners of industrial capital. The choice is ours.
The purpose of finance is to enable business to acquire the ownership of capital instruments before it has saved the funds to buy and pay for them. The logic used by business in investing is things that will pay for themselves is not today available to the 95% born without capital. Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to "save" our way to capital ownership.
The one important distinction between the two factors of production is that in a free society, ownership of the human factor, labor, cannot be concentrated while ownership of the non-human factor, capital, can be.
Work is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means... Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management - the three disciplines - that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible.
One of the proven ways of getting workers more involved with their jobs is by dovetailing employee profit-sharing and stock ownership plans with greater responsibility sharing... Trade unions in this country should... consider these arrangements much more carefully than they have up to now... Expanded employee profit participation and stock ownership would provide workers with a greater measure of economic and social independence, thus stimulating increased productivity.
The thing that the Internet does is it allows labor to move freely across borders in the way that capital does but, traditionally, labor cannot. So the Internet frees workers to be based anywhere and work for employers anywhere.
Because I work with entrepreneurs who own businesses, I have found Doug Tatum's No Man's Land to be a really helpful body of working knowledge. It's very applicable to most businesses that have the usual problems of growing businesses - managing people, capital, markets, etc.
Could there be a better answer to the stupidity of Karl Marx than millions of workers individually sharing in the ownership of the means of production.
We are the necessary element since we expend nothing. Management can create its own capital -- the profits. Its business would grow and profits increase. Labor would prosper as well, while the price of the product would remain constant, the prosperity of industry, labor and management would continually increase. We Jews glory in the fact that the stupid goy have never realized that we are the parasites consuming an increasing portion of production while the producers are continually receiving less and less.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
If capital produces most of the economy's wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal - an affluent level of income - solely by means of his labor.