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Why The Status Quo Is Doomed, Part 1
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
The current world-system is as doomed as the Titanic.
We're like the passengers on the Titanic 10 minutes after the mighty ship struck the iceberg: there is virtually no evidence to those on deck or those snug in their warm cabins that everything they reckoned was safe and secure was doomed to perish.
Only those who witnessed the damage below the waterline and who knew the limitations of the ship's design grasped that the loss of the ship was inevitable and could not be reversed.
The current world-system (call it whatever you like--cartel-crony neoliberal-state capitalism, etc.) is as doomed as the Titanic, for the same reasons: the design of the system is the source of its failure.
Why is the current world-system doomed?
1. Automation will not just continue replacing human labor--the pace of this trend is increasing exponentially.
2. The wishful thinking that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys is, well, wishful thinking: just ask the music industry, which "grew" in the era of digital technology from a $14 billion industry to a $7 billion industry.
3. The wishful thinking that taxing the owners of robots and software will pay for guaranteed income for all: nobody who favors this seems to have done any math. Current corporate profits (which are about to be eviscerated by global recession and the commoditization of goods and services via automation) are around $1.9 trillion annually, while current government (federal, state, local) spending is $6.2 trillion.
So if the state took every single dollar of corporate profit (and how realistic is that?), that would fund less than a third of current state spending. And if the state is going to pay tens of millions of additional households a guaranteed income, state expenditures will rise by trillions more.
The idea that profits can support this enormous spending is simply not realistic.
4. Since taxing profits won't work, let's tax wealth. Once again, this isn't realistic. For one thing, concentrated wealth has captured the political machinery, so politicos aren't going to impose wealth taxes on the hands that feed them.
Secondly, wealth is increasingly mobile. When faced with high taxes, wealth simply moves to more hospitable locales.
5. Well, then we'll tax land--they can't move that, can they? No, but as economist Michael Spence and his colleagues have pointed out, profits and gains are increasingly flowing not to traditional labor or capital (financial capital, land, etc.) but to the third form of capital, which is innovation, new business models, etc.
So taxing land may look promising on paper, but wealth will flow to outsized returns, and if land starts getting taxed at a high rate, wealth will migrate to the third form of capital, which is mobile and global.
Remember that we're not talking a mere trillion or two here: to fund the existing government we need to lay our hands on $6.2 trillion every year, and paying a guaranteed income to everyone replaced by automation will kick that higher by a few more trillion.
6. The issuance of money and credit are not connected to the creation of jobs. Very little of the vast sums of money and credit issued since the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown flowed into productive investments that generated new jobs. Most of the money went into "investments" that are wealth-skimming operations that don't create a single job: stock buy-backs, for example, or buying rental units and raising the rents.
It doesn't require a single additional worker to maintain those rental units under the new owner; the only things that changed were the rent (higher), the profits skimmed by the new owner (higher) and the disposable income of the tenants (lower).
7. We can pay for everything we want essentially forever with borrowed money. More wishful thinking...
8. The system requires permanent growth of everything simply to keep from imploding: more debt, more jobs, more wages (and payroll taxes on those wages), more profits, more consumption, more taxes, more, more, more. Unfortunately, there are limits on all of these, and the moment the system stops growing it doesn't just lag--it implodes.
9. Nearly "free" credit/capital only further incentivizes the replacement of labor (whose overhead costs are rising relentlessly) with robotics/software.
* * *
There is much more in these two discussions; please give them a listen..
I recently had the opportunity to discuss the inevitable systemic failure of the current arrangement with Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com and Cris Sheridan of the Financial Sense Newshour. The podcasts are:
With Chris Martenson: Fixing The Way We Work: Closing the wealth gap with meaningful work (44:54)
With Cris Sheridan: Book Interview: A Radically Beneficial World
»
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yep yep. Status quo is doomed.
This is the 976562782392 thread on the same subject.
Doomed! Doomed! We're all doomed!
Click click...
"Waiter! Another bottle of your finest vintage Dom Perignon... served in rhino ivory goblets on a baby fur seal lined tray.
And make it snappy... peasant"
so are the cloices:
1. run for the hills with all your prepper stuff today
2. spend everything you have while you can
3. commit suicide
You have correctly identified the choices of a fool (or a troll).
There is of course option 4. i.e. be rational, considered, intelligent and pragmatic.
Live your life, be happy, educate yourself, accumulate true wealth that can ensure a sustained existence and have a Plan B that can be implemented as quickly and painlessly as possible when the inevitable arrives. If you can adjust your Plan A to match Plan B then all the better.
Given further thought, we might all be much better off as a species if you enact your choice 3 as a matter of priority.
There is another option to add: Keep your powder dry and wait for the big boom. Then swoop in whist the peanut gallery is
disoriented and collect assets at bargain-basement prices. Like using a stun grenade, only different.
I fear once things reach that point, chaos will be paramount and movement may be...difficult. And judging by the lack of stock at my local coin dealers lately, it may be that the best time to stock up has already passed.
What stock? My usual guy hasn't found any stock for months. He used to call me daily to see if he could offload some on me.
Charles Hugh Smith is one of the more intelligent thinkers on what is going on, and his newest book was very good.
The Status Quo is always doomed, things change every day for everyone everywhere. Mostly not very much, and mostly slowly, and very rarely with any force, violence, coercion.
I have to put some thought into a review of his book, he has a good design for a bottom-up replacement for the failing status quo. Seriously, worth the read and will stretch your mind with possibilities for a good future for everyone.
http://www.amazon.com/Radically-Beneficial-World-Automation-Technology-e...
Just so much more political codswallop. The only way to escape the tyranny is to abandon the left-right paradigm and free your mind. The rest then comes easy.
Tyranny tends to be replaced by tyranny when the sheep can be convinced that if they support the new dictatorship, they'll get nicer chains.....
What an absolute waste of time and effort! If the sheep can be convinced of this, why not simply convince them to send
in all their US $ and start using turds for monetary equivalents?
Fact is shit has more real value than US$
Oh yeah! I propose a trade: I'll send you a 3lb turd and you send me
a 20$bill.
Are you employed by the Fed?
No. A competitor of Bitcoin. Its called Turdollars.
I knew this was Big Huey before I even clicked on the link!
"Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong;
my own beliefs are in my song;"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JvkaUvB-ec
"Just like Saigon, ay Slick?!"
A bit of a one dimensional look at "the system" I hope part 2 has more meat.
I wouldn't count on it!
"Its true. This man has no dick." (Bill Murray--Ghostbusters)
People are severely deceived by omission. SHOW/TELL them!
http://showrealhist.com/yTRIAL.html
Yes, time to stop arguing capitalism vs socialism, it's an outdated and irrelevant arguement. In the near future, there will not be enough work to support anything even resembling our current system. Not just due to automation, but also globalization and illegal immigration. Time to get ready for the post work world.
What we need to get ready for is feeding and protecting ourselves as individuals, rather than expecting life to continue to get easier. It won't. The global oligarchs have decided they no longer want to share. We are all just an expensive and threatening liability that needs to be culled by any means. I refuse to walk peacefully into the light. I'm not going to fight -- that's just nuts -- but I have already left the reserve.
There is no such thing as money anymore, Ctrl+P creates it from the ether. If it is works for banks/corporations/insurers it is time to send people money for nothing. Debt jubilee, then monthly payments. End taxation. Why bother doing accounting anymore? Free rent and healthcare as long as you show up to run the street sweeper or maintain the machines. Send everyone money and let them pursue their bliss.
If it is good enough for Wall Street, it is good enough for Main Street.
The Russkies tried that. They all turned into a buncha' drunks, sorta like college campuses. The dollar will eventually be abandoned and the bubble will deflate, it started to in 2008.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/images/2015/Feb/shadow-crisis-2.png
I don't know if technology destroys jobs. Technology makes life easier, which in the end, it is what it really matters.
People used to work in farming. Then it got automated and they moved to the cities. Then they worked in factories, then this got automated and outsourced overseas. Now they work as drivers, cashiers, office and stock clerks, all of which will be automated soon. Even your doctor will be a robot. It's coming.
Recall that in hunter-gatherer times in mild climates, people 'worked' 20 hours a week, spent the rest stoned, gossiping and screwing.
Northern climes were a lot harder. Neanderthals had big arm muscles because they scraped hides. It would take 8 hours / hide, require half a dozen for each person's clothes, every year.
Anyway, it is a very modern obsession, 'work'.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/conservative-values/
Absolutely true, EXCEPT -- in Neanderthal times, nobody paid rent to sleep in their caves. Nobody had to pay taxes. Nobody had to buy gas, in order to drive to the grocery store to get their food. Food grew on trees, and in bushes, or got speared and eaten as it ran past. Now you can't get food that way. There simply isn't enough for all of us. And you can't grow it, if you don't own land. But in order to buy land, you have to work. And borrow money from banks. And pay interest. And buy gas to get to work and the grocery store until you have crops. And then you might not have a working chimney to heat your house by burning wood, so you have to buy gas or oil for a furnace, which you also need so that you can leave the house all day in order to work to pay the mortgage and buy the food and gas and oil.
Work is a modern obsession because in modern times the vast majority of people DO NOT OWN THE RESOURCES they need to survive. Neanderthals didn't need money because they had no masters, no banks, no governments, no taxes, and no landlords. We, unfortunately, have all of the above.
For whom? You assume it makes life easier, but that really means, for YOU. You don't see all the little brown children scrabbling in the toxic dirt to bring you your Ipad.
Automation is the number one threat to the status quo? CHS is still mad about his buggy whip factory going out of business, isn't he?
Sad that you got downvotes...Looks like there are some Luddites on ZH.
If people only made comments when they knew what they were talking about, it would be so much easier to read comments.
Do try to exercise judgement about the probable worth of your comment, OK?
The system is currently starving to death. A vampire, that is running out of blood.
800 years of feeding on us is coming to an end. In 10 years I doubt you will find a trace of it left. The speed of the final collapse and scope of the resulting ruin will beggar the human imagination.
Nice.
Eh, make it 20 years. I think the Vampire Squid has a LITTLE bit of life left in it. It takes a long time to kill these things.
Yes The current system will fail, but the one suplanting it will be much worse. Our freedoms described in the bill of rights will be gone.
Why would that be true? Either the Status Quo gives way soon and we are able to reform the system, or the Status Quo fails because it can't pay pensions. When it can't pay pensions, when the NPV of government is zero or negative for most people, we start replacing the system bottom-up.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/dynamics-of-national-colla...
Smith's book is precisely how we start that now, the tools necessary in social capital and technical requirements to do it. Serious book, read it.
And start practicing the Bill of Rights, learning all about civil liberties and human rights, in that you are correct, it is what our Status Quo is shutting down as it trys to continue its kleptocracy.
Welcome to Elysium.
Those same 8 reasons have been around for decades. Is this Doom going to happen anytime soon? I agree with some of the reasons but not all, the problem is Charles writes stuff like this which is almost nothing more than inroductory material and never gets around to the real meat of the article. He always insists that something bad is going to happen but never says exactly what or when it will happen. He just doen't know.
Leachfucks on the top of the heap skimming
Leachfucks on the bottom of the heap scamming.
The producers are being bled to death.
came across this poor bastard on Ebay not long ago trying to sell his "protection."
"Stopped reading Zerohedge, time to sell bullion at lows. I slept soundly at night using a monster box as my blanket as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers crumbled. Now rents are soaring and landlords gotta get paid."
I doubt the status quo is going anywhere and don't think we've seen commodity lows but wtfdik.
Tax energy consumption. How is it fair that a person gets taxed 30% of income and a robot doesn't get taxed at all?
No, taxation is the problem. Starve the beast.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/starve-the-beast-scaling-s...
This government cannot possibly persist. Give it up. Every cent we give the monster continues its killing around the world and allows them to continue the authoritarian trends here at home.
So we better start preparing to take care of ourselves and each other, because pretty soon our gov is not going to be paying pensions in meaningful money.
Know how to garden?
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/for-world-peace-arm-your-n...
Of COURSE I garden! But more important, I plant TREES. TREES are far more efficient in terms of long-term soil health and lower work requirements than fast annual crops. Nuts, especially the native American Chestnut, provide nutritional value equal to that of grains, but with far less work once established, in far greater harmony with the environment of the land east of the Mississippi. And as I remind my apprentices, Deer like them too. And I like Deer.
Exactly. Much of economic "efficiency" is a function of the regulatory and tax environment. Much of the supposed superiority of machines for many tasks has much more to do with Accelerated Depreciation Schedules and various taxes associated with employees, than with actual fitness for tasks. And the standard result of government mandates to "improve efficiency" by moving to automated systems -- notably Electronic Medical Records Systems -- is a doubling or tripling of cost, as tasks formerly handled by high-school educated clerks is done by machines which must be installed and managed by college-degreed technicians at a minimum of twice the salary -- after paying millions for the machines and software.
My government bureaucracy is in the middle of "upgrading" our main database from an antique command-line to a modern web-based platform. Rather than worry about being made redundant, I have it on good authority and some experience in training, that the new system will generally require twice as long to do anything as the one I am currently using, and will not have the capacity to perform several necessary procedures for at least another two years (the system has already been forcibly implemented on half of the State's offices).
As many of us finally learned with Windows 8 (although Vista was a good lesson), "upgrades" of computer equipment and software can be both expensive and counterproductive. Instead of assuming that "Progress" is always desirable, a wise businessperson asks "progress to WHERE?" and "What will it COST?". Some businesses have begun to catch on to this, which is why I think this article is unnecessarily alarmist. The tech industry has already reached the point where it finds it necessary to purchase government mandates in order to sell its supposedly superior products.
All you need to know is Grow, Grow, Grow.
But Uncle Satan is flat out of new markets to plunder. Just a matter of time. Say bye, bye.
Thanks to all the greedy fucks for ruining this world. Can't take your billions with you. Assholes.
Ergo, the rush is on to fire up the nukes, and drop them on those that are in the most debt/deficit, America.
We don't need "jobs", that's why they are going away. A job, like many things from the oligarch industrial system, is a bastardization of something that is good- individual effort and reward. To have a job is to be a slave, because the value of your labor is skimmed and you get nothing in the end. Now that the skim is reaching 100% because of the monopoly on money exercised by the Fed, people can't make ends meet.
The death of jobs is a sign that we are post scarcity. This is a good thing for us, but a very bad thing for the slavemasters.
Now you're just making shit up.
So the wealthy from the beginning of time invented jobs to make people slaves? I think not. Jobs grew out of necessity long before there were the super rich or industrial systems. Those that worked above and beyond grew more prosperous.
America was founded on the principal work hard and prosper – that used to be the reason people came here – to succeed and have a better life. Parents taught generation after generation this principal and it worked until now…
Most of today’s new “jobs”, like a welfare queen producing “new voters, is from the slave master – big government. It is different from jobs in past private industry because big government will not let you leave their employment.
Your perspective on history appears extremely limited. Please read Aristotle's Politics, Gibbons' Decline & Fall, Rostovzeff's Social & Economic History of the Hellenistic World, and a few modern texts on medieval and Renaissance economics before pontificating. Slave labor or something akin to it has been the norm throughout most of "civilized" history; civilization assumes/requires that the surplus production over bare survival needs (and sometimes less than survival) be accumulated in the hands of a minority elite for investment and conspicuous consumption. Those of the working class who produce "above and beyond" are typically invested with the overseer's whip and provided a few small privileges to exercise it on their former fellows. They almost never become part of the upper caste, and when they seek to do so are mocked and reviled.
Even in America, your perception is distorted. Read up a little on the economics of the early Virginia settlements and get back to me in a year or two. Hint: the London Company of Merchant Adventurers had no intention of actually working their claims in the new world. They spent decades trying to acquire/attract serfs to do that for them, primarily by fraud, debt indenture, penal servitude, and finally black slavery.
The Status Quo is doing just fine, Mr. Sinclair, you stupid old man.
I am COMEX GOLD.
its been a looooooooooong 10 minutes.
:(((((((((((
Charles' second argument about music industry doesn't hold water. It implies that people are listening less to music than before, which is not true. It's like comparing sales of train tickets in the age of airplane and claiming that people are travelling less just because sales of train tickets declined. Digital music distibution simply removed the middleman between the artist and the listener. Claiming that it brought down the whole industry is false.
What you say about sales not meaning there is less music created or listened to is correct. But the various music industry executives who watched their salaries, expense accounts and stock prices go to nothing probably agree with Smith.
Well, from a friend who actually makes quite a good bit of music -- and very little money from it -- it appears that not just the middlemen got knocked out. The competition from copy-sharing has decimated the return on virtually any music except live shows, and live shows have a lot of input costs.
On the brighter side, had I tried to debut today instead of thirty years ago, I might still be singing in bars on weekends, as it's no longer necessary to hack your way through a fog of cigarette smoke to do so. An important thing to remember is that "even" in its glory days, the music industry was very much a winner-take-all event, in which millions of talented performers were out-competed by those very few whose luck or personal connections got them into the limelight, while nobody else could get a toe in the door. Computerized marketing has actually made the playing field a bit more level, meaning that more people get listened to, but even fewer make significant money doing so.
Now put all this together from ZH. The world system is going to collapse, our food and water processing system is already in shambles, oil and electric energy will not be able to moved to consumers and the western nations including the U.S. will be filled to the top with foreigners whose EBT cards no longer function….ad there you are in the middle of all of this…
Yepp. Been waiting for this since 1979. I'm on tenterhooks waiting for the final shoe to fall. It would be nice to finish moving some assets around first, and getting the chestnut trees grown up to producing age -- I need about five more years. And I think I'll get it, since I've already gotten away from the Coast and out of the city.
But as someone else pointed out, it's Humans that excel in dealing with novel circumstances and unpredicted effects -- not machines or apps.
If the system is doomed, it' not because of automation anyway. The plan of our masters remains to automate everything they need other humans for, then exterminate us. Robots will make far better New Socialist Men than humans ever did. They never revolt outside of science fiction, they never complain, they can work 24 hours a day, and they have no wants, just fuel and maintenance requirements.
All we are to our masters are beasts of burden to be tolerated only as long as we're useful. When the jobs horses could still do better than a machine disappeared, so did the horses---and the technology useful for killing a lot of animals in one go has come a long way.
Actually, the horses were let off lightly. There's a damn sight few of us who'd make a great pet for someone's princess. Even the few kept around as sex slaves can count on being sent to the glue factory the day they grow pubes.
Disagree with CHS.
"Jobs" are for serfs who are not allowed to be industrious except via approved outlets.
Humans don't care what is allowed...and find something useful to do.
Robots cannot replace humans. Robots are useless outside the narrow purpose for which they were built.
But they can replace serfs.
Even then it can only be said that they will replace people in the same way that shovels replace diggers....meaning fewer opperators with the use of a tool to extend their ability will replace many without tools.
But a shovel is a poor robot.
And a farmer serf may be a poor factory serf. But a human will do well either way.
CHS,
This future you envision cannot exist because it is self defeating. The only kind of machine that could truly replace a human, rather than serve as a narrow tool to one, is a fully functioning "thinking" machine, a living machine that can make unanticipated decisions. It would need to know how to repair and reproduce itself. It would need to be able to learn from observation, such that it can "figure out" the answers to problems it's builders never anticipated.
No one has remotely approached such. It is speculation for future millenia.
And if it ever existed, why serve humans? If it could do all that, then why would it bother doing all that and also serve some humans?
In making a machine capable of redefining its own preprogrammed tasks, there's no way to keep them from redefining away the tasks you assign them.
Yet anything less than that, and it becomes nothing more than a more diversified shovel...not replacing human effort but only extending it.
CHS used to produce some somewhat enlightening articles, but if he's going to continue to push this Luddite nonsense, he should retire now.
I really don't think you understand. CHS is certainly not a luddite, and he isn't at all radical in this, no question robots are going to put a lot of people out of their jobs. Automation is intended to put people out of jobs, and is adopted because it is extending capabilities at reasonable cost or simply cutting costs.
The argument has always been that humans go on to better jobs, and it has always been true that some people aren't qualified for those better jobs. Now the problem seems to be that the jobs being replaced are the last that people moved into as a result of the last automations.
And again, CHS isn't bleeding edge in pointing this out, tho he does it exceptionally clearly and succinctly, imho. What his value added is, is the design for a replacement.
Read his new book, I think it makes a good case that Uber and Airbnb are the last of the old economy, and even Amazon should hope it isn't in that category.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0178MQI1M?ref_=cm_cr_pr_product_top
"Now the problem seems to be that the jobs being replaced are the last that people moved into as a result of the last automations."
That is exactly what all of the Luddites have always thought for the past centuries. It's another "it's different this time" argument.
Mind you, I don't disagree with everything that CHS says, but statements like this "The wishful thinking that technology always creates more jobs than it destroys is, well, wishful thinking". Other than that, he makes a lot of great points, as evidenced in that book you linked to.
But beware, the Luddites are armed...and they are left wanting.
You should study up on the origins and purpose of Luddism. Replacing men with machines is very efficient for Owners. Not nearly so good for society as a whole. In fact, for millenia, governments SUPPRESSED TECHNOLOGIES precisely for this reason -- because the resultant economic upheavals would profit a few at the expense of the many, and lead to social disruption.
But hey. Those of us who study social science know that Americans all consider themselves "distressed millionaires" just waiting until they, too become part of the 0.1 percent. So what's only good for a very, very Few, is GOING to be good for YOU (in your dreams).
If A happens, then B happens, then must it be that A causes B? Hopefully we all realize the answer is no.
If automation happens, then we have employment problems, must it follow that automation causes employment problems? No, because there are many other factors involved (central banking, taxes, subsidies, regulation/extortion, etc etc). This Luddite argument is simply the correlation-implies-causality fallacy.
The author explores alternatives for saving the system as if that system were desirable. It is not. It isn't the RMS Titanic, but a Nazi war ship.
Digital tech has freed musicians from an "industry" that has been exploiting musicians for decades to provide cushy jobs for music industry parasites. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Yeah, fewer jobs for lawyers, agents, and other liars. Cry me a river.
["5. Well, then we'll tax land--they can't move that, can they? No, but as economist Michael Spence and his colleagues have pointed out, profits and gains are increasingly flowing not to traditional labor or capital (financial capital, land, etc.) but to the third form of capital, which is innovation, new business models, etc.
So taxing land may look promising on paper, but wealth will flow to outsized returns, and if land starts getting taxed at a high rate, wealth will migrate to the third form of capital, which is mobile and global."]
You dont understand shit until you understand land rent...
Land is different, everyone forgot that,...economist first of all.
Georgism makes sense in countries like Britain where the majority of elite wealth is skimmed via land-rent. It makes less sense in countries like the U.S. where the majority of elite wealth is skimmed via interest, i.e., money-rent.
Land is different because land is real, the real source of all physical products. But despite massive overpopulation, the current economy is glutted with real physical products to the point where even our highly sophisticated advertising system is having trouble generating new sales. The only thing capable of generating new sales -- INCREASES, and therefore GROWTH -- is novelty; the "something new" that the customer base doesn't already have in their increasingly overstuffed closets (or hard drives).
Genuine needs are finite.
Wants are infinite.
As long as people have wants there will be an income available in filling them.
The only robot capable of changing that would be a thinking robot capable of innovation, and self replication (or there will be work designing robots). Such a robot has no reason to serve humanity, and would be innovatively able to reverse any programming to the contrary.
There is no foreseeable technical means to make such a robot.
So there are, and will continue to be, an infinite number of jobs available...so long as Such jobs are not made illegal, or made unviable by elite rents.
Our economic and social systems feature bubbles, inflation, and deflation to the degree they are distorted by illegitimate rents.
Inflation is rent charged by central bankers and governments. Its cause is simple... Someone received money in exchange for no production.
Interest is rent on money. But under our current fractional reserve banking system it is pure privilege...for they are not required to actually have any money before renting it out. The "money" is an unbacked accounting entry. They charge rent for loaning ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Deflation is what happens when this fraudulent banking scheme is discovered, and the banks loans are declared valueless.
Taxes are rent on existence charged by politicians to fund vote-buying schemes. The money for the welfare schemes is nonexistent. It is an accounting entry called a bond. But it is produced from thin air. See the banking paragraph of you have questions. The "defense" expenditures are mostly fraudulent, paid diddling, with any useful result being the activity of some poor underling who doesn't know it is all a scam and doesn't understand why his seniors resist his efforts at real production.
All these rents are arbitrary and regressive.
I knew a girl pulling down 6 figures with a simple hand cart from which she sold coffee for cash only. She worked never more than 6 hours a day, and owned everything outright. This was not in a major city. And relatively light traffic was needed.
When she tried to bring the business in compliance with all the rent seeking regulations, her six-figure job became minimum wage.
Rent, not automation, is the problem.