World's richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1T this year

That is, it can be true that I feel rich or poor by comparing myself to others, not based on my absolute wealth. It can also be true that I look at any individual transaction and decide whether to make it or not based on whether it makes me better off in absolute terms.

That the labor theory of value is entirely bunk is trivial to see. If you present to a buyer two indistinguishable instances of the same good but describe how one was meticulously hand-crafted by skilled artisans and the other produced by machines in a factory, in the prospective buyer’s view the former is no more valuable than the latter. Value is imputed by the end consumer who is willing to pay only so much for a pair of shoes, a hat, a computer, a book, an automobile, a house, whatever. Marxists object that this is “commodity-fetishism,” but their many syllables fail to camouflage their deep confusion.

Even employers — rather than exploitative expropriators — are sellers of goods or services but buyers of labor, one of many factors of production. Consumers set prices with their willingness to buy. Producers seek to meet this demand at a profit. (Running a break-even operation is a bad model: at best you end up back where you started and otherwise book red ink.) To take profit, they must produce at a cost below what the consumer will pay, the prevailing price. Raw materials must be bought ahead of time. Employees expect regular paychecks. The employer must risk all of these costs by paying up front for a chance of turning a profit in the end.

Employees likewise are sellers of labor, a role that Marxists fail to recognize or else they’d have to slap expropriator labels all around. Employees shop their skills to find the buyer who values them most highly. When a better offer comes along, we usually congratulate the person for finding a better situation even though it is the same worker now supposedly “extracting” more value. The downside is sellers compete against one another. When the value proposition grows too rich, we buyers start shopping elsewhere. “Cheap labor” is nothing nefarious; everyone is looking for a better deal. Sellers of goods, services, and labor must all continue to improve their offerings.

From top to bottom, this is a network built on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation. The ruthless player is the fickle consumer whose tastes, demands, foibles, and sense of urgently are always changing. There’s also Mother Nature, sometimes gentle and sometimes furious. We live in a world of scarcity with the future uncertain. Where will tomorrow’s dinner come from? How will parents pay for their kids’ college years down the road? How will I pay the light bill next month? Capitalism’s aforementioned complex network of voluntary exchanges — “the market,” for short — is a search process for how best to allocate what we have now in order to obtain what we need and want tomorrow.

That's argument from intimidation and not a valid form of argumentation.

> In effect, late stage capitalism becomes the anti-thesis of the spirit of capitalism - devoid of competition, free innovation, and upward mobility

Fortunately the world isn't in late stage Capitalism, because there is no such thing. As one obvious example, China has only begun to emerge from its backwards Communist shell, it's still in the first innings of its application of basic market economics. It's still doing trial runs market economic structures in things like asset ownership in general (eg equities), banking and real-estate. Its currency and bond markets are in the very early development stage. Other emerging economies such as Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil, India are similarly going through their own very early stage experiments with market economic structures.

In the US, more people are moving up and out of the middle class, than are moving down and out of it. That has been the consistent trend for 50, 30, 15, 10 years.

There's zero evidence to support the notion that either the US or the world are meaningfully devoid of competition. It's competetion in fact that is terrifying so many. 20 years ago Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Priceline, SpaceX, Airbnb, Oracle, PayPal/Stripe/Square, Cisco, Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Tesla, T-Mobile, eBay, et al. were either non-existent or small compared to established corporate giants. That's just for the US, China has hundreds of business giants that didn't exist 20 years ago at all.

There's so much competition coming from the US tech giants, the EU is taking aggressive government intervention steps to begin restraining them from routing European competition. That's the exact opposite scenario of not having competition.

Leaders in AI? Not IBM. It's AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Leaders in vehicle automation? GM had to buy its way back to the table, Ford is still running far behind. Companies like Google, Tesla, Uber, and dozens of smaller SV companies, have led the charge.

Leader in electrification of vehicles? Tesla has overwhelmingly led the charge, most everyone else (except perhaps for Nissan and partially GM) is running from years behind.

ULA for the future of space launch? No, it's SpaceX and Blue Origin.

GE? Dying.

Exxon? Dying.

IBM? 21 straight quarters of revenue decline.

Alcoa? Who?

US Steel? Who?

Sears? Dead. Walmart? Mortally terrified of a company that didn't exist in 1993. JC Penney? Dead. KMart? Dead.

Pfizer & Merck? Say hello to Celgene, Biogen, Gilead, Amgen, Regeneron, Vertex, Genzyme, et al.

Banking? Welcome to the online, payments, crypto revolution. Ant Financial is moving more money every year than most of the US financial giants; it didn't exist in 2003. Square, Stripe, PayPal, Ant, Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, et al. are setting the stage, not JP Morgan or Bank of America.

Travel? Priceline is more powerful than most airlines or large hotel chains. Ditto Airbnb.

Taxi industry? Largely dead, destroyed, bankrupt. Million dollar medallions? Gone. Say hello to Lyft, Uber, Didi, et al.

Food delivery etc? Booming. Dominated by Sysco, McDonalds, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Heinz? Nope. Companies like UberEats, Grubhub, Blue Apron, and dozens more.

Old media? Dying and desperate. Newspapers? Dead. Old radio giants? Dead. Cable? Bleeding out. Say hello to Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

The list just keeps going.