alt Hacker News> who is going to pay for them? not the people who are making the profits.
They kinda have to. If I'm so productive at producing food that I grow enough for 2,000 people, I have to find 2,000 people to feed. Or the land sits fallow and I get nothing at all. There is a lot of wiggle room at the margins, but overall it is hard to get away with producing more stuff and warehousing it.
We'd expect to see a bunch of silly jobs where people are peeling grapes and cooling the wealthy with fronds; but the capitalists can't hoard the wealth because they can't really do anything with it.
"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit.
A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth."
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath