As long as underemployment, public over-indebtedness, and the widening of labor-income inequality remain structural in a country’s economy — and even when only one of these ills still prevails — systemic reforms are required. Well designed, over the years they form a coherent whole that restores soundness to growth, competition, the terms and level of the public levy (the sum of taxes and new public debt), shareholding, wage-earning, pensions, privatizations, and the provision of economic securities — labeled “social” as if to conceal what they in fact are: exchanges of premiums or contributions for benefits, pooled on actuarial lines, and not gratuitous transfers.
The growth in question is that of individuals’ power of exchange and economic transfer. Its definitive raison d’être is to raise the quality of the services and goods supplied — whether sold on the market or provided publicly. To conceive such growth on a contrary model is socially and ecologically absurd; wanting it to reduce inequalities still requires, first, helping to steer the mechanics of that growth well, by way of a first lever and a second. Firstly: link growth to direct placements in new share capital — renewal driven by capital. Secondly: link growth to the public levy, held by common agreement to two rules — a chronically-in-surplus budget result and the counter-cyclical modulation of public investment. The aim is a state in which every guideline and provision conforms to this course of action. At the level of a nation, of a group of nations, or of many other geographical areas, an economic policy concentrates public authorities and private initiatives on what is essential in this matter only insofar as it stipulates by which actions the ceaseless revival of growth is to be ensured — by which permanent actions, then111.
A regenerative therapy can be administered, but it runs against the grain of two atavisms — one statist, the other employer-side — across which, in many countries, the keys to blocking and unblocking systemic economic transformations are distributed, the two camps overlapping considerably. So long as the statists and the employers oppose it by tacit agreement, sound shareholder exchange — the distribution by an enterprise of all its earnings — will not come into force.
On the wage side, the counterpart is the instituting repeal from which sound wage exchange proceeds — the abolition of the fiction of employer contributions — likewise part of the regenerative therapy, and a lever for freeing the nation from public over-indebtedness. Here too, so long as the employers, the wage-earners’ unions, and the public authorities oppose it by tacit agreement — statism aiding, and whatever the reservations of the public authorities and the unions on this point — sound wage exchange — the true wage revealed, freed of the charges that mask it — will likewise not be implemented.