What is the "Machine Tool Principle?"
A note to readers: this is an old post on the archive website for Promethean PAC. It was written when we were known as LaRouche PAC, before changing our name to Promethean PAC in April 2024. You can find the latest daily news and updates on www.PrometheanAction.com. Additionally, Promethean PAC has a new website at www.PrometheanPAC.com.
Where does profit come from? Did you "invest right" in your mutual fund or bitcoin or did you get lucky at the casino? Or, have you created something which advances society's ability to increase its potential relative population density? That is what Lyndon LaRouche called "the machine tool principle."
“...The point is, that for any national economy taken as a unified whole, scientific and classical-artistic progress, combined, are the only source of sustainable profit, nothing else. The machine-tool sector illustrates the role of science in this. For the imperiled economy of the United States, and, of many other nations, today, the lesson told is a desperately urgent one, even if it appears to address only technological progress as such..."
— Machine-tool design: the brains of profit, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Dec. 7, 1996
For more on the machine tool principle, see LaRouche's 1997 article, Return to the Machine Tool Principle.