At some identifiable point in the twentieth century, the world's most powerful economies decided that the activity of *repositioning existing wealth* — banking, insurance, financial derivatives, rent collection, regulatory arbitrage — constituted a legitimate and even prestigious form of social contribution, deserving of enormous compensation and institutional protection. This paper asks when and why that happened, argues that it was a catastrophic category error, and proposes that AI automation offers society its first genuine opportunity to correct it. The elimination of rent-seeking roles is not a loss of value — it is the liberation of human energy from its most elaborate and socially sanctioned form of waste. Furthermore, the common identification of the poor as society's "welfare dependents" is empirically inverted: the largest welfare recipients in modern economies are the extractive institutions themselves. The correct response to AI automation is not defensive protection of all existing jobs, but discriminating identification of which jobs create value and which merely extract it — and the enthusiastic automation of the latter.
Brandon Charles Emerick (Tue,) studied this question.