 Clara did love Peter. She loved him enough to want to spend a life with him, but she was undecided about whether she wanted to marry him. He had been out of school for four years and still wasn't even looking for a job. She had tried to stay away from the subject, but he was proposing marriage. That had brought it forward in a way she felt compelled to answer. She tried to set him down gently. I want a home and family, but we can't make a life together on love alone. Economics is a part of life. The very purpose of family is merging into a unit, and that commonly comes with a family intent, a fit and intent to bring up a next generation. People without an income have a very restricted opportunity. They have less to offer as their part in the nation, and less to offer in their support of a family. In the United States we have a sovereign people who own their nation, who own their government, and who also own their economy. It is owners who set purpose on what they own. The purpose for the U.S. economy is the purpose for the people. It is purpose that includes economic freedom and prosperity. And this perspective is essential. It is our key for effectively understanding our economy. People are the only party in interest. Nobody else matters. If the economy is not serving people, it does not serve anybody. There are only two real performance metrics for our national economy. One is what goes to people as economic product. The other is what comes from people, what we commit to get what our economy produces. The human purpose for having an economy is converting that time and effort that we choose to commit to productive pursuits into goods and services that we both receive and value. This is also the citizen purpose, for we are the people who commit the time and effort to productive activities. It is also the public purpose, for we are the public. There is no other public to receive what our economy produces. The question isn't how many people are unemployed. It is whether our economy has needful employment for people to earn good income from their efforts. Performance of the economy is in freedom to choose where to work and prosperity that comes with what people commit to their economic activities. Prosperity is in citizens being able to choose to spend on what their economy produces to meet their needs and wants. It is economic freedom. It is having sufficient resources to live well, to raise the next generation, and to support senior family members in retirement. When someone else decides where you get to work, it is economic slavery. Having access only to products others would have you purchase is economic slavery. Having someone else spend your money on what they decide is right is economic slavery. As an initial metric, the number of hours the average family must work in a lifetime to gain a reasonable living is a working measure of prosperity. In my grandfather's generation, only the fathers worked and raised large families and mothers were expected to maintain the home and family. In my father's generation, fathers were expected to work for a career and mothers were welcome to work and to supplement the family income. In my generation, many families feel the need to have two income earners and hired others to care for the younger family members so that both parents could work. Our long-term witness shows a declining prosperity. We have a working rule for this from performance engineering. If things are failing in spite of what we are doing and we continue doing the same things, the result will be future failures. If you continue doing the same thing, but with greater effort and intensity, it will yield an even more spectacular failure. Gaining an increase in our economic performance is going to require some fundamental changes in direction. We have attempted changes to our economy in the past, but still have a resulting loss of prosperity. Doing the same type of changes more intensively invites more spectacular declines. That is the reality of performance. In modern commerce, we have business largely performed under corporate leadership with external management through legislation and government regulation. Our economic efforts are through corporate business entities that are run by administrative management leaders. Each business performs the economic function. It consumes the time and effort of employees to produce goods and services. When the businesses are most effective at this function, the economy will be most effective at satisfying the public's purpose for having an economy. We have the immediate challenge of corporate leaders who firmly believe that their management decisions will determine the success or failure of their businesses. The only real decision makers who determine business income are the customers who buy or refuse business products. For other corporate relations with outsiders, the corporate owners are just the source of the corporation's capital resources with the corporate leadership deciding how much of the business earnings they should distribute to investors. These leaders are corporate employees making decisions on behalf of investors with neither effective agency established nor personal responsibility accepted as to those investors. To challenge this further, the administrative leadership of modern corporations sees itself in ongoing competition with labor, the working employees. Put this into our understanding of the purpose for the economy, the people's purpose. The modern corporation is not focused on representing the owners except on a trust me basis that assumes support for internal corporate decisions. These leaders do not intentionally serve their customer base but try to align their operating decisions with what the public is willing to buy. They do not intentionally serve their employees, the working public, but call upon the working public to support whatever leadership besides upon has a corporate direction of effort. Our major corporate business units have been witnessing the result in terms of increasingly exporting their business efforts outside this nation so that they no longer even serve the working public. These corporate businesses are legal constructs that should only exist for the purpose of we the people. The legislation that continues to support their existence, like the law itself, has been based on the sovereignty of leadership on the business aristocracy that gets its living through the productivity of the people working within the corporation. What we have been doing creates internal division between leadership and labor, though both are hired to operate the same business. As noted in earlier lessons, there is no less effective way to do anything than to divide into competing camps where one side can accomplish only what the other side cannot prevent. Our technical term appropriate to internal competition is waste. Waste is cost without benefit. Type two waste is output from the business that neither earns nor contributes to earnings. Type one waste is incoming resources that do not contribute to business performance. Taxing business is waste. It is removal of income from investors in terms of what no longer comes to them as return on their investments. It is removal of income from employees in terms of what the business cannot earn to pay them as income or benefits. It is removal of income from customers in terms of what the tax business much charge for its product in order to stay in operation. A tax on business is just another way for a sovereign ruler to seize on the income of its people. The business purpose for the English common law was support for the commerce of common people. It was as a farmer who raised cows so that he could sell their milk. It was seeing to the economic welfare of common people so the aristocracies could prosper off of what they earned by their productive efforts. The basic purpose was not changed through the American Revolution, but the aristocracy was denied the ability to tap into what the common people earned. It was having a government protect and promote commerce without having to support an aristocracy. Taxation was largely built into a new American aristocracy in government, one that harvests the commerce of people to support what leaders decide is best for people. Government efforts have arranged an economic aristocracy largely through laws of incorporation. The welfare of the people may still be the purpose of individual leaders, but the modern business legal system is otherwise directed. Regulatory business management is a way to deny sovereignty of citizens, where the government draws taxes from unwanted business efforts, it draws taxes from people, where the government pays public dollars to lower prices, it is trying to regulate the purchase decisions of citizens. This is actively interfering with economic freedom of many through expending the prosperity of everyone. Economic regulation provides no valid economic purpose for expending public dollars. If the people will not support a regulatory purpose on their own, having the government tax the people to expend on it fails the test of representing the people. Public spending on politically determined actions has been ramped up until it is a severe blight on personal prosperity. A tax bill exceeding 25% of all that a person earns severely damages prosperity of citizens. Wherever government spending supports a huge part of the public, they will not be producing value for other people to receive. Nonproductive people are a drag on the economy. The productive capacity of the United States is awesome. It has been able to keep us out of other poverty for decades, even with the sovereign leaning government sucking prosperity out of it. There are indeed changes to be made by following generations. They will not be effective through additional government spending, but through redirecting government to actually serve the public. Supporting the economy by insisting that our business elements deliver what people value to the people who value it. The change will not be through government creating employment through spending public dollars, but through working to eliminate the waste that is sapping our economic performance. The change will not be through government regulation of industry, but through empowering citizens to own and operate corporate entities, keeping our business entities focused on serving their owners, their customers, and their employees. The change will not be through those changes that have been done in the past supporting the sovereignty and independence of business aristocracy, but through serving the sovereign citizens who invest, who work, and who buy goods and services to meet citizen wants and needs. Instead of the government trying to serve the people through regulating industry, it will be less expensive and more productive to empower investors to set management upon corporate operations, empowering customers to assure that they receive what citizens value, and empowering employees to assure a fair days wages for a fair days productive efforts. The direction of change is simple enough. It is serving the people instead of serving the economic aristocracy. It is performing the functions of supporting the people instead of first creating artificial people and then selectively supporting those created bigs. With this, we have that all important legal purpose for government management over our operating economy. It is to empower the people to own and to operate their economy, supporting the people as they arrange for commerce to serve their needs and their wants. It is to protect their productive efforts from interference and support their efforts coming together to operate businesses that serve the people. It is to support the productive commitment of people as a way to earn a living. It is to promote the effectiveness of citizens through education and training, giving special support where it can enhance the effectiveness of citizen efforts.