It’s getting more difficult to deny that naysayers of capitalism have at least a partial point:  It is possible to become obsessed with the markers and measures of capital, ascribing to money itself the value that it only represents.  It’s also increasingly clear that this erroneous obsession is advanced mainly by the actions of the naysayers.

The threads of this thought begin with Ted Nesi’s tweet of an Economist article that led him to wonder:

Will there be enough jobs for everyone in the coming years?

That thought interweaves with this passage from a Victor Davis Hanson essay titled, “The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization“:

Over 90 million Americans who could work are not working (the “non-institutionalized” over 16). … our electrical power, fuel, building materials, food, health care, and communications … all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to produce what about 160-170 million others … consume.

We’re looking at two trends, here. First, technology means an ever-greater amount of the goods and services that human beings require can be produced more cheaply and efficiently by machines. Second, we’re attempting to backstop quality of life by setting prices (such as the minimum wage) rather than looking at value.

Ultimately, this dynamic contributes to economic inequality.  The forgotten principle is that the economy has no meaning outside human beings and their activities; a machine doesn’t value anything, so it cannot add value to the economy. But certain segments of the population benefit disproportionately when we maintain the value of money in contravention of what human beings actually value.

Those 90 million Americans should be working, driving down the price of labor, which would drive down the price of producing goods.  At the same time, the fact that more households have less income (rather than fewer households’ having the same income) will encourage businesses to drop prices to capture the dispersed demand.

(More later.)