Except almost everyone can produce things. You have to produce things people want. Not only that, you need to find the people who want your stuff, especially if

Except almost everyone can produce things. You have to produce things people want. Not only that, you need to find the people who want your stuff, especially if its niche. Yes, I'm a highly paid software engineer. The people who created the company I work for are, however, far better paid. There's nothing stopping me from quitting and building my own business and selling the software I produce. I have the funds to seed my own startup, so that's not even an issue. That's a shitload of work though, even if I hire people to handle the individual parts. Very quickly I'll be spending more time running a business, finding customers, marketing, dealing with legal crap, etc, than I will producing software. I can also produce software, stick it on github and hope for the best, but there's countless people who do that for shits and giggles (and for free). Distribution, logistic, and those "middlemen" actually do a lot of work to link the product with the customers. Sure, there's parasites in the middle, organizations that just take licenses and shifts them around without doing anything. You can absolutely make a case to cut those off. But the orgs/software that link products directly to customers who want said products generate tremendous value, and it's often a lot harder to do than produce the good in the first place.