> no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical

> no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical and convince people to pay a lot of money for them, a capitalist will gladly pay for everything from digging to shipping of those rocks. From a common sense perspective that activity is useless because it's purely wasting resources with no useful effect. From a capitalist perspective the activity is not useless as it brings profit.