Yep. Can't have high-paying jobs. That would empower people.
We are very rapidly moving toward a time when the labor battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will have to be re-fought. History is clearly showing us that the alternative to activist labor is feudalism. In "natural" markets, multiple overlapping network effects cause nearly all wealth to flow to a very tiny number of strategically positioned or connected participants. Everyone else must fight for a slice of the pie. Even in a growing-pie scenario, nearly all the growth flows to the top; a rising tide lifts only the largest boats.
The libertarian ideal of volitional culture leading to equality and general prosperity is, like nearly all other political ideals, rapidly shaping up to be false. It's becoming clear that the natural state of human affairs is feudalism, and that anything else is an unnatural state that must be maintained "artificially."
They worked for a while. Now new approaches are needed. Everything is like that. Human progress requires both a continuous input of energy and a continuous state of change and innovation. There is no formula for progress of any kind that can be applied unchanged forever.
I know where you're going with this. It's possible to ask the converse question: what happens when everyone has a low-paying job?
The answer is that deflation must occur. Home prices must fall, etc.
The problem is that deflation is incredibly painful, more painful than inflation. Activist labor is highly inflationary, which in today's debt-overburdened environment is exactly what we (meaning about 99.5% of the population) need.
You can make shoulda-coulda-woulda arguments about how we got ourselves into this mess with too much debt, but there's two problems with that. The first is the pragmatic fact that we are here and that populist-driven inflation is the least painful way out. The second is a bit deeper. One thing that's becoming clear from history is that "trickle down" economics does not work. Money does trickle down, but it trickles down in the form of debt. Why engage in entrepreneurial ventures or pay higher salaries when you can lend money at interest with less work required on your end and more assurance of repayment? There's a direct balance sheet correlation between the rich getting richer and everyone else going deeper into debt, since the savings of the rich become the debt of everyone else.
I am not, by the way, advocating "socialism" in any dogmatic sense. That IMHO is another discredited dogma. I am advocating pragmatism in lieu of a better idea, since I think all political dogmas are discredited at this point. If you don't have a systematic approach to solving a problem, the only choice you have is between winging it and doing nothing. Doing nothing here will lead back to feudalism.
Edit: one more point: Silicon Valley folks have a distorted picture of the rich. California's neuvo riche tech elite are not in the mainstream for their class. In short, your rich people are better than everyone else's rich people.
The mere existence of folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shows by virtue of comparison that the vast majority of their socioeconomic contemporaries are merely lucky gamblers who have rationalized their ascent as meritocratic via survivorship bias. If being in the 1% were truly meritocratic we would have a ton of Elon Musks launching a ton of world-changing ventures all the time. Instead we have a bunch of mediocre rich people putting their money in dumb Wall St. funds that do nothing with it but buy government bonds or create more debt (and me-too herd-driven bubbles) for the masses.
Heh... I guess another solution would be much smarter and more creative rich people. :P
when you go to codeacademy that is your choice to improve yourself, and you either enrich yourself or quit. Fine. Very few on HN say, "you're an awful person, you tried to code on codeacademy and couldn't do it" (OK maybe someone might rag on a non-technical MBA that tries to pull the strings on engineers without understanding the damage they are causing).
When the government urges people to go do things (presumably to be followed by things like subsidies), it is a recipe for blowing up the industry by steamrolling people through it. Good examples abound: Home ownership. Going to college. Getting into STEM.
