Feelings of worker insecurity helps the economy. It reduces our ability to shop around, and ask for higher wages.
Job losses from automation, or really just the simple idea that there isn't enough truly valuable industrial work for 7 billion+ people, help keep the employed in line.
> The government certainly has no place in this success story; if anything, government is the adversary, looking to stifle innovation at every turn with its dimwitted regulations and parasitical taxation.
The author would do well to study recent history from reputable sources. This smells of opinions formed via mainstream media or, more likely, their filter bubble of US Libertarian Facebook & Twitter posts.
"Capitalists" had little interest investing in a number of technologies we take for granted today. They wouldn't exist without government subsidizing them, and giving it away to industry. They've incorrectly labeled government the problem when it would be more accurate to blame partisan politicking.
US Libertarians can take a long walk off a short pier. Government is evil! Taxation is theft!
Well, give the general public all your tax subsidized wealth (especially if you're a Silicon Valley billionaire) back then. Oh, but that would be immoral too. Nice catch-22
And the whole US Libertarian notion, peddled by Thiel in numerous articles, that we all ought to sit back while the wealthy use their material wealth to dictate what we all work on is barbaric.
Musk & Thiel are hardly special humans. Neither have added truly novel information to human history. Not in the same way say Einstein or Darwin did. Leveraging great wealth, wealth that is backed by the majority "believing" in the system your wealth is created from, while peddling notions that the masses are just in the way (this is more Thiel than Musk) is self-aggrandizing.
If either of them drop dead tomorrow, nothing would change for the bulk of humanity. That's how important rich capitalists are. It's your capital people are interested in. Not you. It's like Marx said; We're at a point where we only view people in terms of their economic value. No one cares about Gates or Buffet. We only pay attention because of their wealth.
The calls for a general strike on Feb 17, for one. The internet can be used to organize labor movements globally.
It just needs a little push at this point. No where near as hard to organize compared to when folks had to be in the same place.
A completely peaceful demonstration against the status quo could be achieved if enough folks simply... stopped going to work.