Friday, September 8^th was the 101^st birthday of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., the leading genius of the 20^th and 21^st Century in the tradition of the founder of our Republic, Benjamin Franklin.  It was also the anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, whose leadership of the bestial modern British financial Empire, LaRouche fought for most of his life, after he witnessed that Empire’s slaughter of Indian patriots at the end of the second World War.

In a 1980 book, written for his National Democratic Policy Committee called A Gaullist Solution for Italy’s Monetary Crisis, LaRouche explored, in depth, the appropriate relationship between the individual, the productive private enterprise, and the state, in a properly ordered industrial capitalist republic.  The entire work is available on Amazon and is well worth your study. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y7PP5TP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

He develops that relationship by exploring the role of patents in a technologically advancing capitalist economy. Here is our excerpt:

The production of wealth is an indispensable fulfillment of man’s essential obligations to exert dominion over nature, and to transform nature lawfully according to the new needs of a growing human population. Without technological advances in productivity, flowing from fundamental, continuing progress in science, mankind would come to exist, at best, as a pathetic remnant on this earth: a few millions or so in total, degraded toward the level of moral and intellectual tribal life of a troop of talking baboons. As the memory of Paul VI would otherwise oblige us to insist: this does not mean that the gratification of sensual appetites is in and for itself a morally tolerable, or self-evident premise. The function of material progress must be situated, conceptually, within the statecraft of Western civilization’s Augustinian traditions of city-building, of nation-building. . .

Purgatory” is a condition, as we noted, in which the whole universe is wrongly separated by the mind into two hermetically distinct parts. The one part, is that of individual secular man seeking “earthly paradise” within a narrow, ephemeral passage from cradle to grave. For the moral citizen of “Purgatory,” the moral universality, the “spiritual,” is the “other world.” The mere widespread character of the popular delusion that such a form of division exists is not evidence in the slightest degree that an actual separation, either functional or ontological, exists between a material and a moral universality. The continuously efficient Creator is not separable from the universe He efficiently continues to create. Indeed, if we develop ourselves to become able to plumb the lawful ordering of our material universe sufficiently, it is the consubstantial instrument of the Creator, the Logos of both Plato and the Apostle Saint John, which confronts us most directly in that way. . .

The key to the private ownership institutions of republican forms of industrial capitalism is a properly industrialist view of the patent.

Under republican policy, the patent, a power and creation of the state, is a privilege extended to the inventor of useful inventions and also to the collaborators of that inventor for specified conditions and a period of time. This privilege takes the form of a right which may be invaded by no agency of the state itself; a right in ownership of the means of production. The inventor and his collaborators are granted the right respecting all competitors to produce and conduct profitable commerce in articles based on the advantages of the patent. . .

In all matters bearing on relationships between the state and technologically progressive forms of private ownership, the principles underlying the development of this form of the patent must not be forgotten. “Existence is not a predicate.” That principle, otherwise applicable to the highest levels of scientific discovery-practice, does not lose its proper force of applicability as we descend the scale of importance to principles of public commercial policy. “Existence” in this instance of application is the underlying purpose behind the development of the patent.

The principles underlying this patent apply to incomes-policies of the contemporary state. Essentially, the essential purpose of the patent must be served: the purpose of the patent is to give expression of liberty to that individual creative-mental power which the state as such cannot and does not efficiently contain. Stated otherwise: the function of the state is to order the “environment” for the individual member of society such that the creative-mental potentialities of the individual flourish to the advantage of society as a whole.

Therefore, the state must not attempt to regulate innovations in practice of productive firms and their commerce in detail, since, in such a bureaucratic practice, the state violates the self-interest which society as a whole expresses through the medium of the patent. The establishment of minimum wages and minimum standards of working conditions does not violate that principle. It is an abomination that one firm should seek advantage over others by any other means than better technology and better management. That constitutes a prima facie violation of the inalterable principles and conditions of the patent. The degradation and other injury to households of productive labor represented by exploitatively low wages and poor working conditions are such abominations, injuring not only the victimized households in particular, but generating a lowering of the cultural standards of household life which is a major injury to society as a whole.

It is also required of the state, by the same principles, that the state protect technologically progressive, competently managed agriculture and industry by tariff policies. No consideration must be permitted to force agricultural prices paid to farmers or incomes of industrial firms down to levels, at which exploitative wages and abusive working conditions become the only source of profits for technologically progressive, competently managed farms and industries. In between, except for enterprises properly managed by the state, there should be nointervention by the state into the details of operation of the patent. This has no relationship to the wicked doctrine of “free trade” advanced by such charlatans as Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

The state, while avoiding bureaucratic intrusions in matters of detail, is obliged to shape the environment of business practices to encourage business to choose options which coincide in direction with the determinable general national economic interest. The promotion of technologically progressive, capital-intensive productive investment, through tariff, credit, and taxation policies, is a very efficient shaping of incomes policy. Such a shaping of policy impels employers to employ relatively more skilled operatives, engineers, technicians. This requires improved cultural standards of households, and promotion of skills-development among employees. This means that rises in real wages tend to follow advances in technology, rises in real-wage levels of relatively more skilled labor which are readily dispersible, because of the gains in productivity associated with capital-intensive forms of technological progress. The result is a lifting of the incomes of the population through a process of advancement in mean skill levels of employment.

State, protectionist tariff policies, combined with credit and taxation policies, shape the environment such that earned increases in skills levels of employment are payable in fact by such employers. The state properly does determine recommended incomes policies as matters of the scientific-research and public-information functions of the state. The state applies such developed recommendations to its own employment practices. So, the state provides leadership by proper methods of direction. Its leadership action centers around informing employers of where those employers’ best interests lie in respect of a truly enlightened self- interest, respecting incomes policies.

This aids the proper relationship between trade unions and employers. The private relationship between the employers and trade unions helps to minimize the scope of required actions by the state. National trade unions provide the necessary social influence for promoting coherent incomes policies among employers. The state, by providing scientifically premised public information showing the reasons for preferring certain incomes policies, creates a climate of public belief in this matter among employers, employees and others, aiding in channeling trade-union negotiations into rational composition of economic and directly related issues. The basis for incomes policies of the state is the same principle underlying the existence of the patent. Irrational anarcho-syndicalists and bestial employers share the infantile delusion that productive labor is mere animal muscle deployed according to detailed instructions of management. Show me a management which practices such a policy as a matter of philosophy and I have shown you, in return, an incompetent management.

It is the development of the mind of the industrial operative, as reflected in his or her manifest or potential levels of productive skill, which is the wellspring of the productive powers of labor. It is that mind’s powers which enables labor to advance its mode of production from lower to higher levels of technology. It is that advancement, not the mere output-ratios associated with a fixed, routine mode of productive activity, which is the productive power of labor. It is that productive power of labor which is the only source of all of the wealth of society. , , The most fundamental of all desirable working conditions of labor is progressive change from routine in the application and development of more advanced skills, always emphasizing, increasingly, the mental potentialities the operative can bring potentially to refinements and problem-solving in the technology of production. It is such technological progress, and only such a process, which “humanizes” productive employment. All contrary or alternative views on this matter are dangerous frauds. It is not only the inventor and his entrepreneurial collaborators whose mental-creative powers advance the condition of society. The potentials of such inventors and entrepreneurs depend upon the creative-mental potentialities of the productive operative, the employed scientist, engineer, technician, and ingenious production executive. It is the individual mental-creative potentials of all citizens which must be fostered for fruitful expression.

This is the principle which subsumes the patent’s existence. That higher principle is correspondingly the essential limitation conditionality to be imposed upon the continued holding of the patent’s privileges.