Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
Even in the US tax system money is prioritized to labor and it is a reflection of the larger trend - money is far more valuable than work and the rewards for the creation of wealth are distributed with the lion's share going to the money involved and the crumbs to the labor.
That taxation system is pretty common in the first world countries, actually. The usual 4 categories are:
-money/investors (lowest taxation)
-property owners
-labor
-self-employed labor (highest taxation)

Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
The standard approach from the past of 'let the market price everything' is not a long term solution because the increase of productivity means that the labor side is systematically weakened while the money side is systematically strengthened in the process.
A free market requires not only educated and informed consumers but also low barriers to entry for competition. Without those, the market tends to stabilize in monopolies or duopolies with cyclical changes in the top dogs... usually when the previous top dogs missed a game-changer. It's no surprise that the large companies are spending insane amounts of money to avoid both.

A lot of the issues in this thread can be tracked through the changes in the retail industry over the last century or so. Retail went from full service through skilled "sales associates" in small shops, to self-service with serviced check-outs by "sales associates" in department stores, to self-service with basic check-outs in supermarkets, to self-service in limited choice with self-checkout in discounters where one "cashier" oversees up to 8 check-out lines.