From what I understand, the people you defend capitalism from tend to assume that those individuals themselves are less relevant than is their place in the larger system.
Does this summary of the arguments line up with your experience?
1) Most people are more involved with the famous and common 'bullshit jobs' instead of the much fewer super-productive jobs - like a couple of farmers who can feed orders of magnitude more people than just themselves. Maybe they haven't interacted with the parts of the economy that do genuine wealth-creation and don't understand it.
2) They don't accept that incentives matter more than inherent nature, so they believe the productive will continue producing even if the incentives to do so are reduced, so resources can be redirected to 'those with needs'.
The second is a pretty defensible position, although obviously I disagree most of the explicit and implicit assumptions.
As an aside, this has already become one of my fastest down-voted comments. Could someone stop by and explain what they don't like about it? I didn't think it was very inflammatory.
Can I ask why you put quotes on 'those with needs'?
I honestly don't think this will fix itself until we face great depression 2. When the government is no longer able to bail out the rich because they will have accumilated so mamy resources that nobody will be able to save them from self-imposed financial peril.
That may be true in bullshit heavy fields. When it comes to actual labor though the figure is closer to 99 in 100. Unproductive plumbers just aren't going to last very long.
Also you're getting downvotes because you're ambiguously questioning the merits of socialism. But you already knew that.
Not only are everyday people poorer but GDP is stagnant. From a western perspective the rich got a ton of raises and failed to deliver. We have countries with negative birthrates and people living in smaller homes with more food insecurity. Central Banks have been doing their best to raise prices and keep the rich afloat yet I don't see the big economic miracle.
Prehaps the source of their wealth is not productivity but good old fashioned power dynamics? What value are the rich providing to most people exactly? Wonderful new technology? That's pretty neat but what else do they have to offer?
One phenomenon that's been happening is the increasing top-heaviness of society due to automation because you simply need less people to work. The value of labour has plummeted for other reasons as well such as mass immigration and the workforce increasingly incorporating women.