Margit Kennedy (!) - Interest and Inflation Free Money

Figure 15 Labour Costs Are Higher Than Just Salaries On average, every workplace in the German industry carries a debt load of DM 70-80,000 (> $35-40,000). Interest alone makes up as much as 23 % of the average labour costs (25) (see Figure 15). To the share of interest on borrowed capital must be added the interest share on the firm's own capital. The latter orients itself along the same interest rate as the former. This is why debts increase about two to three times faster than the economic productivity of the country (see Figure 5). The proportion is constantly getting worse for those who work and for those who want to start a business.

We are witnessing increasing concentration in the industrial sector.

Small businesses and industrial firms are being bought up by larger ones and larger ones are being bought up by even larger ones, until one day almost everybody in the so-called "free market economies" may work for a multi-national corporation. This development receives its impetus from the so-called "economies of scale" and from automation of larger industrial firms, but also from the surplus money gained by these businesses on the money market. Siemens and Daimler-Benz in Germany, for instance, earn more money through investments in the capital market than in the production sector. In fact, they have been characterized in the German press as large banks with a production front.

In contrast, smaller and medium-sized firms in order to expand usually have to borrow money and, therefore, are trapped in the interest and compound interest system. They cannot capitalize on the economies of scale, and they cannot capitalize on capital.

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