in such cases, labor is being leveraged, not obviated. the labor shifts to those who build, monitor, and maintain the machines doing the work that used to be done directly by laborers. capital is the accumulation of the fruits of our (leveraged) labor. that we privilege capital is why we’re in a tight spot, rather than labor not being the basis of value.
the miracle is that we can build more while doing less, but nothing gets built if we do nothing at all (e.g., wealth concentration).
Both capital owners and workers are paid according to the prices set by the free market for their input. Most of the generated wealth however is captured by the society (ie we each derive more value from the stuff we buy than the cost we pay for it) and by the government - taxes on work, consumption and profit are usually much larger than other costs in a company operation.
Capital tends to concentrate, indeed - but that is also a good thing as it allows bigger enterprises. However the cost to build a new business has been steadily decreasing over the year together with the cost of capital while its availability has been increasing. Today's most productive people can easily open their own practices and set their price on their own contracts. The "rent" they pay is hugely outweighs by their future profits.
If you want to rail agains something, rail against the fact that financial education and investing is not more widespread so people do not understand that they can participate and invest in capital markets from very low amounts of money. Capitalism is powerful and empowering but requires work and education.
Not all capital is the result of labor. Economists put around a third of modern capital to be the result of labor, around a third from leveraging capital, and around a third created by technology.
Labor, investment, and technology all drive new capital creation.
That is capital that owners had to pay for in full, so there’s no creation of value happening.
The owners obtained this capital from the profits extracted from other workers in the past or, if early enough, the appropriations known as primitive accumulation.
capital allows the labour specialization to exist. After all, capital is 'saved up labour', available for expenditure for future purposes.
Imagine if you wanted to manufacture a car, which takes a long time to make. If you didn't have capital, you'd have to find/forage for food, and have very little spare resources left to actually do the car manufacturing. If another person, with a large storage of food, gave you said food, but ask in return, for the car, it would work (it's just a matter of negotiating an exchange rate between the food and the car).
Capitalism puts capital in the hands of private owners for the sole purpose of rent extraction.
I’d say decoupling capital from production in this way leads inevitably to all the things you mentioned for the simple fact that it optimizes for exactly that outcome rather than producing value.
I guess the theory goes that capital invested in profitable endeavors should produce value as a side effect. But it seems the capitalists determined that speculation and protectionism produces far more rent than actual value creation.
Edit: Not that this is an argument for central planning. Just that we still need to find a mode of production that optimizes for producing value rather than rent.
In other words, own productive capital and live off the rent it generates. Personally I think such capital should be owned by the workers at a business so that they don’t have parasitic individuals like the author to support. It’s nice for you if you have a lot of wealth and don’t have to work, but the rest of us pay the price of that, and only a tiny slice of society can ever live that way, for obvious reasons.
Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.
Without their capital the whole organization where workers are creating would not exist in the first place. So the market is rightly rewarding capital owners for risking it in the first place.
Do you think that is easy and just "collecting rent"? What is your experience investing?
We built machinery, processes, IP, etc using saved and invested capital. That machinery wouldn't be built without the capital. And thus labor would be nearly valueless. The machines and processes also stop functioning when the ownership structure is destroyed as we have recently seen in the Venezuelan oil wells. With capital its very much the virtual (ownership) driving the creation, maintainance and operation of the real (machines, processes, etc).
But the question is, why did those few get to own so much of the capital?
If the thing we had was already capitalism, then doesn't the very fact that they have so much capital prove that they are the best at making the smartest (read: best return) investments?
And if not, then doesn't that mean the problem was that we already didn't have capitalism, and fixing inequality by itself is a fool's errand, since we should really be fixing the distortion that lead to the outcome of the bad investors owning the wealth?
For that matter, how did it come to be that capital is so concentrated that most productive people have to rent it to generate wealth?
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