Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some magical utopian profession where people want to pay for tooling? Like, I'm sure there are people/groups who spend more on tools, like say, all the plumbers and carpenters buying $600 dewalt drills or whatever, but I'm having trouble with the idea that they want to do that. If programmers, on average, don't pay very much for tooling, the magic of capitalism tells me that's because the tools aren't worth…
You don't need $600 dewalt drills to open holes for most carpenter's. Ah, but we used to pay, and many of us still do, because as programmers, some of us also like to earn salaries, we don't get to buy groceries with pull requests.
What exactly is the argument here? All programmers should buy programming tools because otherwise programmers will starve to death?