You should get more upvotes.

Reading the Wealth of Nations gave me a new found appreciation for Capitalism. At the beginning, the ability to profit from improvements was the motivating factor, and helped to achieve some of the freedom people enjoy today. Unfortunately, times have changed, so your average worker does work on something that they cannot increase their personal profits by improving. Wage-earners are indentured servants, with little incentive to improve their output. Most people think Capitalism is all about the man at the top, but Smith's theory was that the power of the individual to retain the profits of their work was the main cause of the destruction of the feudal system.

Smith actually believed late-stage Capitalism would look like all the profits were generated by financiers and bankers, and once that happened it would destruct as unsustainable.

So at some point, labor becomes valuable in some manner, or we won't be Capitalists anymore.

Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).

If you're interested in this, are willing to contrast your view on things, and have the time and stamina for it, I'd recommend you to take read Marx's Capital. In the books, Marx accepts the premises of a free market capitalism utopia as laid out by contemporary economists, and logically derives the contradictions and instabilities that arise on a societal level. Whether you remain a free market believer or not, the books will deepen your understanding and enrich your view of the world.

It is an intellectual challenge to get through. David Harvey has produced two free video lecture series that can help: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/.

I freely admit I know little of Marx's work other than what other say, I will have to read it at some point.

I used to be the same way about Smith until I read Wealth of Nations Volume 1-3. Overall I found Smith's writing to not reflect the modern day free marketer's mantra as much as though.

Here's an interesting Smith quote P. 358 in my edition: "The interest of the dealers however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public."

I don't think Smith thought Capitalism resulted in Utopia at all, as I said, he believed that once late-stage Capitalism arrived, it would self-destruct. Early Capitalism involves craftsman and merchants, so everyone is fairly productive, the craftsman creates, the merchant gives the craftsman money or credit so the craftsman can continue to craft. Then the financiers arrive, and at first it's very helpful, the merchant has more credit, the craftsman always has a buyer for the craft, the financiers are like oil for the gears. Unfortunately, the profits at the financing part are disproportionate to the profits from crafts and merchants, so eventually Smith assumed the greatest part of profits would all one day be tied up with the financiers, but since all profits have to start with crafts and merchants, this is unsustainable for the long term. In Smith's view financiers don't actually add to the "capital" of a country, interestingly enough.

So, when I say I have a new found appreciation of Capitalism, I'm really referring to the early stages of Capitalism, specifically how Smith explains it in 1776, and not how it portrays in say Stone's Wall Street.

> Possibly we are in a blip, where a couple of decades from now labor-intensive jobs will be spread around the globe more evenly again, when labor in China etc. isn't as easy to arbitrage (which is where the real profits where labor involved come from).

For one, several companies are already moving their "jobs" out of China and back to the US, but they are just investing a few million in an automated factory with half a dozen overseers and a contracted out engineer corp to fix broken things.

It isn't magic or far future. We can, right now build a machine to do almost anything. For the last decade, it was just more economically feasible to just use slave labor in China than pay the upfront costs for a factory that takes in raw materials and pumps out a car.

The only thing we don't easily reproduce in machines is the human ability to react to unnatural circumstances. Adaption in machines is still state defined limited or dependent on a lot of machine learning try and fail scenarios. That will probably be a solved problem really soon™.

> or we won't be Capitalists anymore.

I don't think we have been for a while. Like you said, working for fixed pay for fixed hours is much more feudal than reaping the profits of ones productivity. A extremely small fraction of the population actually (or even can) engage in entrepreneurship, and almost all ventures always end in a few taking the profits and the rest taking fixed pay.

I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff. Besides really tiny tech startups, they always devolve into fixed wages. I also think the tech startup is a fleeting passion, in a decade the app boom will be saturated. Taking a new software idea and a couple friends will be prohibitive in an era where all the best ideas were exploited years ago and now are super massive, and taking advantage of the laxing of big business to jump on opportunity just isn't as big a market as a completely empty field of untried creations.

Bob's Red Mill is now employee owned, and I think maybe SAS shoes? When I worked at 7-11 they had a profit sharing program you could participate in if you worked there long enough (a year I think), although that was years ago they might not do it anymore.

But yes, I think those are exceptions. In technology I still tend to get stock options and an employee stock purchase program, so there are still niches you can get in, but for the most part the people who can leverage their position is much smaller (I'm certainly not in the 1%, but easily in the top 10%, even though I don't feel like it) these days.

There are some news of companies moving back to the US, but so far finding something actually made in the US is still a rarity, especially something cheap.

Machines certainly improve our productivity, but that's been happening for a long time. Smith uses the example of nails, a skilled blacksmith made at most a few hundred nails in a day, an assembly line of a few specialized people makes many thousands.

At some point maybe robots do everything, but at this point in time I think it still has more to do with cheap labor arbitrage. It's a lot easier for people to blame robots or something rather than their pursuit of profits, though.

> I can't think of almost any companies where the shareholders are the staff.

The famous example in the UK is the John Lewis Parternship department stores. Their workers own the company, they receive fixed wages and then a share of the dividend at the end of the year.

A number of the bakeries in the Bay Area (Arizmendi, The Cheese Board) are run as cooperatives based on the Mondragon cooperatives in Basque Country.