> It sounds like you're advocating ... literally shut down private businesses, possibly beating and robbing their owners in the process
No, that's what happens in the scenario where we make workers redundant and fail to provide some alternative social contract.
> Because there's some formula for determining "social value" which has "number of employees" as a factor?
Value of Social Contract = (cost of what you have to sell)/(cost of what you need), aggregate over members of the social group in question.
Markets ruthlessly optimize both the numerator and denominator. So far, the scales have tipped in a direction that benefits most members of our society because there has been plenty of (relatively) valuable work to do. That may be changing. A decreasing numerator can be worse than an increasing (or shrinking-but-too-slowly) denominator. Even in aggregate. The market doesn't really have an innate preference for one direction or another.
It's up to us to fix the problem if the winds shift. If we don't, someone else will, and it will get very messy.
No, that's what happens in the scenario where we make workers redundant and fail to provide some alternative social contract.
> Because there's some formula for determining "social value" which has "number of employees" as a factor?
Value of Social Contract = (cost of what you have to sell)/(cost of what you need), aggregate over members of the social group in question.
Markets ruthlessly optimize both the numerator and denominator. So far, the scales have tipped in a direction that benefits most members of our society because there has been plenty of (relatively) valuable work to do. That may be changing. A decreasing numerator can be worse than an increasing (or shrinking-but-too-slowly) denominator. Even in aggregate. The market doesn't really have an innate preference for one direction or another.
It's up to us to fix the problem if the winds shift. If we don't, someone else will, and it will get very messy.