Thank you for continuing the conversation, Carmelo. Your defense of capitalism is admirable but displays all the usual flaws of such defenses.

My point is that it is not only the low skilled laborers who are exploited, but the consumers, the majoprity of whom are the same people. To continue the burger analogy, if burgers were so desirable that a high value was placed on them by the population at large, there would be no need for the massive marketing mand advertising budgets required to persuade consumers to purchase them.

As for the farmer converting his fields to a theme park, that is a wonderful illustration of what is fundamentally wrong with our present system of using and distributing the planet’s resources.

Theme parks, like burger joints, are a way for the entrepreneur to garner for himself the surplus generated by the labor of others. Farming is an activity essential to the supply of basic necessities. Therefore farming ought to be far more profitable than the operation of a theme park.

A better analogy would be the employment, by the farmer, of a machine to do the weeding (which is what happens in real life, in the developed world at least), leaving the laborer without work. In a propeerly organised society that laborer, rather than being unemployed, would be freed to acquire new skills with which to improve the lives of every member of his community. For that to happen, at least some of the surplus generated by the new machine would have to be set aside to facilitate the retraining of the laborer, instead of enabling the farmer to purchase a more powerful limousine.