Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all.
Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over.
Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today.
Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that.
The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.
Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else.
> Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.
We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.
Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics.
The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve just come up with a clever way to take someone else’s work and exploit it.
only emotionally crippled people like fashion, if they were healthy they would all dress in gray unitards and march in formation towards the glorious future!
hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!
I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law. Inheriting is different; the money is already made. Interest is being useful to someone else, via the loan of capital.
No, that's not true. Capitalists make money from simply owning things, not because they're necessarily doing anything useful.
Laws shouldn't be equated to ethics. There have been and will be countless ways to make money legally and unethically in any society.
And how many workers even have the possibility of an arrangement like this, i.e. a worker-owned cooperative?
Yes, that is exactly the point. When a labour-saving technological development comes along, it's payday to the capital-having class and dreary times for the labour-doing class.
>hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!
Please don’t straw man¹. That’s neither what I said, nor what intended to convey, nor what I believe.
The examples considered that: gambling, collecting interest, price gouging, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors.
I'm from the UK, and we used to make motorbikes. They got - correctly - outcompeted by Japanese bikes in the 1950s that were built with more modern investment and tooling. If Japan hadn't done that, we'd have more motorcycle jobs in the UK, and terrible motorcycles that still leaked oil because the seam of the crankcase would still be vertical and not horizontal.
I'm not saying anything about this process is perfect and pain-free, but it seems that a lot of the things we have now are because of processes like this. Should Tesla sell through dealerships instead of direct to consumers? I think the answer is, "Tesla should do what's best for its customers", and not "Tesla should act to keep dealership jobs and not worry about what's best for its customers."
Businesses exist for their customers and not their employees, and having just been part of a business that, shall we say, radically downsized, I've seen a little of the pain of that. Thankfully it was a high tech business, and as the best employment protection is other employers, and there are loads of employers wanting tech skills I've seen my great colleagues all get new jobs. But I think it's ultimately disempowering to think of your employer like a superior when it should feel like an equal whose goals happen to coincide with yours for a while.
Can you elaborate on this? How can I become a capitalist so all my possessions start earning me money?
Capitalists make money from simply owning things, but that doesn't imply in the slightest that everything that can be owned produces income.
The classic example is a landlord: he collects income because he simply owns the land others need or want to use. He doesn't necessarily have do any work that's useful to anyone else, not even maintenance or "capital allocation."
Gambling - I don't do it, but I'd need more specifics to see why gambling is bad in this sense. It's a voluntary pursuit that I think is a bad idea, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Price gouging is still being useful, just at a higher price. Someone could charge me £10 for bread and if that was the cheapest bread available, I'd buy it. If it is excessive and for essential goods, it is increasingly illegal, however. 42 out of 50 states in the US have anti-gouging laws [0], which, as I say, isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about legal things.
Underpaying workers - this certainly isn't illegal, unless it's below minimum wage, but also "underpaying" is an arbitrary term. If there's a regulatory/legal/corrupt state environment in which it's hard to create competitors to established businesses, then that's bad because it drives wages down. Otherwise, wages are set by what both the worker and employer sides will bear. And, lest we forget, there is still money coming into the business by it being useful. Customers are paying it for something. The fact that it might make less profit by paying more doesn't undermine that fundamental fact.
As for supporting laws to undermine competitors, that is something people can do, yes. Microsoft, after their app store went nowhere, came out against Apple and Google charging 30% for apps. Probably more of a PR move than a legal one, but businesses trying to influence laws isn't bad, because they have a valid perspective on the world just as we all do, unless it's corruption. Which is (once more, with feeling) illegal, and so out of scope of my comment. And again, unless the laws are there to establish a monopoly incumbent, which is pretty rare, and definitely the fault of the government that passes the laws, the company is still only really in existence because it does something useful enough to its customers that they pay it money.