You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the 21st century are not the welfare-dependent poor — the villains of Tea Party propaganda — but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich.

The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

The minimum wage would be $16.50 an hour — $33,000 a year — if it had kept up with the growth of productivity since 1968. To put the effect of this a different way, 40 percent of Americans now make less than the 1968 minimum wage, had the minimum wage kept pace with productivity gains.

To put this even another way, the average American’s living standard would be much, much higher today if wages had not decoupled from productivity gains – with the gains all going to the 1 percent instead of being shared by workers. If wages had kept pace we wouldn’t feel the terrible squeeze that everyone in the middle class is feeling.

On the afternoon of May 6, 2010, CNBC viewers could have mistaken the channel’s programming for an apocalyptic blockbuster. The Dow, already down 400 points on bad news from Europe, had suddenly plummeted another 600. Erin Burnett, wide-eyed, gesticulated at charts to illustrate the “unprecedented” 1,000-point drop. The typically manic Jim Cramer reached a new level of frenzy, shouting at viewers to buy—BUY!—Procter & Gamble, which had fallen 25 percent, and wagging his finger at the screen: “If that stock is there, you just go and buy it. It can’t be there. That’s not a real price!”

Prices of nearly every stock and exchange-traded fund had plunged in minutes. Some 300 securities experienced wild gyrations, with trades executed at prices as low as a penny and as high as $100,000 a share. During the same second, shares of the consulting firm Accenture traded at both $0.01 and $30.

In what was later dubbed the “flash crash,” nearly $1 trillion in shareholder value was wiped out in a matter of minutes before the market rebounded, eventually closing down 3 percent from the previous day. Almost five months later, regulators would conclude that, on a day when traders had already been shaken by the Greek debt numbers, a single massive sell order executed by an algorithm belonging to a firm in Kansas had triggered a series of knock-on events that sent the market into a tailspin. The analysis portrayed “a market so fragmented and fragile that a single large trade could send stocks into a sudden spiral,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Over the last decade (and especially during the last four years) wealthy nations have increasingly brokered deals for huge swathes of agricultural land at bargain prices in developing countries, installed industrial-scale farms, and exported the resulting bounty for profit. According to the anti-hunger group Oxfam International, more than 60 percent of these “land grabs” occur in regions with serious hunger problems. Two-thirds of the investors plan to ship all the commodities they produce out of the country to the global market. And droughts, spikes in food and oil prices, and a growing global population have only made the quest for arable land more urgent, and the investments that much more alluring.

In what a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) characterizes as a “new form of colonialism,” investors from the US, UK, and China are gobbling up foreign farmland at “alarming rates” and often with little consultation and compensation of poor small-scale farmers and local populations.

It’s not necessarily all doom and gloom. These industrial farms should be much more productive than the ones they’re pushing out, it should lower global food prices and may provide new revenue for the local governments. Who knows? Those governments might even spend it on improving infrastructure if they don’t just pocket it. But then the question is do these people even have access to global markets so they can benefit from lower food prices? And if they don’t now will that change in the future if the governments do begin to develop? And of course there’s all the disadvantages of industrial farming (environmental degradation and the growth of stronger viruses and bacteria).

South Korea will permit the launch of cooperatives starting next month, providing additional channels for people to start small businesses leaning toward democratic ownership and public interest, the finance ministry said Monday.

   A related law will go into effect on Dec. 1, and the central and municipal governments will immediately begin receiving applications and registrations for the launch of cooperatives, according to the ministry.

   Under the law, five people or more can start “general cooperatives” or “social cooperatives.” The former is similar to conventional enterprises, while the latter is focused on non-profit business activities.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Cabinet Secretary Francis Maude welcomed recommendations by government-appointed adviser Graeme Nuttall, a partner at London law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse, to create a government-led working group to foster worker ownership. They also backed the creation of an independent body to support companies in transition to a new ownership model and the creation of legal templates for companies to speed up the process.

“Businesses that are owned by their employees produce more, grow faster, keep their workforce happier and pay staff more fairly,” Clegg said in an e-mailed statement in London today. “Our economy suffered a massive heart attack –- now we have to build our strength back up.”

The government will consult on changes to amend company law until Nov. 16 and on plans to give workers the right to request ownership. The U.K. has about 250 worker-owned companies with sales of about 30 billion pounds ($48 billion).