The paradox of capitalism is that business interests (capital) are in direct opposition to workers' interests. Businesses are incentivized to reduce costs, whic

The paradox of capitalism is that business interests (capital) are in direct opposition to workers' interests. Businesses are incentivized to reduce costs, which means paying workers as little as possible, squeezing as many hours out of them, and laying them off as soon as they're not needed. Sure everyday workers are sometimes the customers as well, but that's becoming less and less the case. Google and Facebook don't make their money off you, they make them from advertisers working on behalf of businesses. Real estate developers in Manhattan don't make money building affordable middle class housing (hence the non-existence of such developments), they make them off luxury high-rises targeting the wealthy. Combine that with technological advances and globalization allowing increasingly consolidated corporations to replace workers with robots/software and move jobs overseas, and the end result is that wealth is more concentrated, the economy is more concentrated (plutonomy), and your average Joe living in rural New England just doesn't matter as much to the vault-holders in an economic system where we only see each other as dollar signs. No amount of retraining or "bootstraps" is going to bring the jobs back. It's just not possible to compete with the corporations and their larger moats and bankrolls. The only option is to work for them, or perish. These corporations aren't building anymore satellite offices in rural areas or opening up to remote work (due in part to the increasingly competitive job market), so the only option is to move to expensive cities with chronic housing supply shortages. These rural areas are as economically useless to the wealthy elites who run the show as the homeless people camped outside their offices. Anybody who claims we're not ready for a UBI yet is living in a bubble.