Good point about the rich. Even now, a hand-painted painting by the original artist costs way more than even an extremely good copy made by a hired painter with great skill, which costs more than signed limited-edition reproductions, which cost more than unsigned reproductions. We only need a few zillionaires who value original art to keep a number of people employed as painters.
I suspect in the real world, production will tend to distribute across people in such a way that any system with more production will tend to have a higher amount of stuff owned by even its poorest, no matter how good the machines. If a trivial picture of capitalism puts all of a tremendous amount of wealth in a minority’s hands, that minority will have to be willing to slaughter viciously parts of the marjority to “protect” its property rights. If you are that rich, why would you be willing to do something so distasteful? Better to just let things get reorganized and only have a tenth or a hundredth of the zillions of dollars you theoretically would have had under the old organization.
Good point about the rich. Even now, a hand-painted painting by the original artist costs way more than even an extremely good copy made by a hired painter with great skill, which costs more than signed limited-edition reproductions, which cost more than unsigned reproductions. We only need a few zillionaires who value original art to keep a number of people employed as painters.
I suspect in the real world, production will tend to distribute across people in such a way that any system with more production will tend to have a higher amount of stuff owned by even its poorest, no matter how good the machines. If a trivial picture of capitalism puts all of a tremendous amount of wealth in a minority’s hands, that minority will have to be willing to slaughter viciously parts of the marjority to “protect” its property rights. If you are that rich, why would you be willing to do something so distasteful? Better to just let things get reorganized and only have a tenth or a hundredth of the zillions of dollars you theoretically would have had under the old organization.