and these events "just happen," like the weather, without any will or planning or policy decisions made by the elite for their own benefit?  the plants, like browsing brontosaurs, just happen to wander out of town on their own, without the ownership and managerial class making any decisions which benefit their own narrow interests and injure the interests of less wealthy people?

does the relative 30-year fall in the US of average income for the average working person, compared to the enormous rise in the average income for planning and ownership elites, signify absolutely no will, planning, or intention on the part of said elites to rig the economic game in their own favour?

the greatest ideological triumph of what we currently call "economics" is the pretence that a system  designed by and run for the benefit of a small elite is somehow a natural formation, like a crystal or an electromagnetic field, and as morally neutral.  to my ear this is as hollow and self-evidently propagandistic as the earlier rationale that the feudal order was ordained by God in heaven and reflected accurately the divine order, or that it's silly to pass laws against rape because "it's human nature, boys will be boys".  things are how they are (say the winners) because that is just how things are.

a surplus of labour is created by conscious decision making, just as wars are fought by conscious decision making.  those decisions are made by elites who do not fight and die in the wars, or risk any personal loss by reckless economic mismanagement.  the big lie of the dogma (not, imho, the "science") of economics is to render this conscious human decision-making, the exercise of elite power and planning invisible, to pretend that these carefully engineered systems "just happen" and must be accepted as we would accept gravity or the laws of thermo.  it's a brilliant ideological hat trick -- as beautiful in its way as the Divine Right of Kings and more clever, because instead of teaching us to worship the ass who sits in the throne it teaches us to ignore the man behind the curtain.

I suggest Debunking Economics by Keen, which confirms my long-held suspicion that the math behind current economic dogma is shoddy as Ptolemaic planetary mechanics.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...