You use “socialist” like a toddler uses “poo-poo”.

But words have actual meanings. Do European workers control the means of production? They do not. Europe is not Socialist.

We live in a time when it’s never been easier to create new value without significant up-front capital. You don’t need a bank loan or a venture capitalist to build the virtual community around you when one’s vision and will are sufficient and you have time to invest.

If I didn’t know you were an affluent white guy, this paragraph would have clued me in.

For the poorest 50% of America — that is, the people who will be starving and dying — “creating new value without significant up-front capital” has always been incredibly difficult and now will be impossible.

How are you supposed to “create new value” if you don’t have money for food or rent? If you don’t have access to technical skills? If your network is entirely full of people who are as broke as you are?

But explain it to me, if you will. Imagine I’m an autoworker who get laid off, or a waiter, or someone who works in retail, or a brewer. Imagine I have absolutely no capital at all, as is the case for the majority of Americans.

What will I do? If you tell me, “Learn to code,” I’ll just laugh at you. No, no one’s going to hire someone an autoworker who took a four week bootcamp when they can hire some developed who’s been studying this material for a decade and has actual experience under their belt. No one’s going to “learn to code” and write the next Facebook or Google without years of experimentation and study.

What we’re going to see is this — the collapse of small businesses (actually, this has already happened, but it will take some time for the statistics to catch up), of retail, of pretty well any business that doesn’t have massively deep pockets. Amazon will take over the retail sector, including food, and replace millions of middle class jobs you could build a life around with a smaller number of jobs without benefits where automation runs the workers to the point that they can barely stand — and if they drop, well, there’s another desperate person waiting right outside the door.

Whole sectors of the economy will take years to come back, if they ever do — restaurants, live music, hotels, tourism in general.

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But you claim to be so smart. Tell us specifically: how are Americans “going to create new value without significant up-front capital”?