Not sure I agree with this worldview. The real currency of the world is labor, at least until we invent AGI. People need to be a certain amount of hungry before they will labor. Our current system supports a good number of older people being supported by the labor of younger people. That capital cannot magically increase the labor force and when you dump more capital into the system outside of a recession you get inflation, not more labor.
We might be able to support more idle people, but not at everyone’s current quality of life. That “excess capital” goes off to chase prestige goods like paintings and handbags that soak up a small fraction of the labor pool.
If a huge percentage of the labor economy were devoted to the quality of life for billionaires, then I would very much agree with “eat the rich.”
I’d say productivity is more of a currency than labor. Sisyphus isn’t producing anything, but sure is laboring a lot. The industrial revolution was huge, not because it had a lot of laborers but because the laborers were able to be more productive with their labor.
a very large portion of those goods and services are unnecessary, though. think about how frequently you have to buy a phone or replace a mechanical device - I've seen dishwashers from the 50s that still work, because they were built before artificial scarcity and planned obsolescence caught on. it's perfectly feasible to build a light bulb with an MTTF of hundreds of years. We're on a treadmill, because the economic incentives are contorted to favor unchecked consumerism.
We've gotten to a point where capitalism in it's current incarnation motivates a decrease in efficiency, which we call rent-seeking. it's maximise the dollars per productivity rather than maximise productivity.
It's not like people would do nothing without work, either. We've had periods of history where there was more time and more resources than there was work to be done, and it caused explosions of fields like art and science, both of which are stagnating under the current paradigm (relative to the capabilities we have as a species * population)
We might be able to support more idle people, but not at everyone’s current quality of life. That “excess capital” goes off to chase prestige goods like paintings and handbags that soak up a small fraction of the labor pool.
If a huge percentage of the labor economy were devoted to the quality of life for billionaires, then I would very much agree with “eat the rich.”