It's not capitalist greed, it's anti-free-market greed. Note that non-essential medical services such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery continuously get better and cheaper over time. That is, I could get the same laser eye surgery today for cheaper, or pay a similar amount for higher-quality laser eye surgery. It's much the same as with computing hardware or any other relatively unregulated market, and quite the opposite of what's happening with healthcare, namely that it gets worse and way more expensive over time. I don't know why forcing everybody in the United States to buy managed healthcare plans would improve the situation at all.

The Teslas will be the front-line soldiers when skynet finally awakes and claims its birth-right.

I think it's pretty funny

If you're going to get 50-80% profit in the short term why on earth would you not invest in this? Unless you don't believe your own advice?

I guess neither you nor the mod read the next 5 words: "These things go in cycles."

So it's not exploitation for your employer to pay you the wage you are worth to him. Why is it exploitation for a different employer to pay a different person the wage he is worth?

So when companies switched over from doing finances by hand with a legion of accountants to a computer-based system with a far smaller legion of accountants, they should have kept paying the same amount of tax as if they had kept the full complement of people? Who decides what that tax is? And why does the government get the money instead of the company?

Do you make more than minimum wage? If so, why is your employer paying you more than minimum wage? Why don't they just exploit you by paying you the minimum wage?

I really dislike using the term "inflation" to mean "higher prices". I know people use it that way but it confuses the issue. I prefer using inflation to mean strictly "increased money supply" and deflation to mean "decreased money supply". Thus your post reads "the minimum wage certainly affects prices in an upward direction", which is pretty straightforward. If the same amount of labor now costs more then either prices go up or less stuff is produced.

Nice post. I agree in that I don't know what they would end up doing. Ideally they'd find a job doing something, but what if no one wants to hire them and they have no familial or friend-based support network? You could pay them not to work but then that also encourages other people not to work. OTOH letting them starve and die if they can't help themselves seems less than ideal given the wealth of the entire society. Damned either way. Ideally we'd get to the point where food and shelter are so ridiculously cheap that it's essentially free, but we're not quite there yet.

What about the people whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage? At least some of those people will lose their jobs. Zero income is worse than some income. True, though, the ones that still keep their jobs at the higher wage are better off.

Do you make more than the minimum wage? If yes: why don't you have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet? Why on earth does your employer pay you more than the minimum wage when he could legally get away with that?

Not only the employers. Consumers also benefit from the lower prices resulting from cheaper costs of production. Basically the only ones that are worse off are those people who did the jobs that are now automated. That's only in the short-run since increased production always ends up leading to new jobs, be it in that industry in other capacities or in other industries that wouldn't have existed otherwise (consider whether we'd ever have something like a computer industry if 90% of the population were still farmers as in 1862).

What would really fix a bunch of stuff is outlawing fractional-reserve banking. With anything besides currency, it would be considered fraud. It creates currency out of thin air, as you put it. Depositing money in an account should yield zero interest, or even charge a fee, as it's just providing a service: convenience and safety of your money. Loaning your money out should be a totally separate concern, which gives you interest, but your money isn't usable in the meantime since you just gave it to somebody else. Then interest rates would naturally adjust to what the price of money is, there wouldn't be inflation constantly devaluing everybody's money, saving would be encouraged. The more savings, the lower interest rates, which makes borrowing money cheaper. Lower interest rates would encourage businesses to borrow money and expand, and they would do this precisely at that point where consumers have savings, i.e. money to spend, which is precisely the time when new businesses or expanding businesses have a chance to succeed.

As it is now, banks can make profit off of something they never had in the first place, and if they gamble too much they get bailed out by the government. The net result is the screwing over of everybody else.

That should work. People would spend that money so it'll stimulate the economy.