"It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work"

A wry paradox exposes the opposing fantasies built into modern economic life. On one side, the drive of owners and managers is to strip labor from production, lowering costs through automation, outsourcing, and process engineering until the human element seems dispensable. On the other, the dream of many workers is to detach livelihood from toil, securing income, time, and dignity without subordination to tasks that often feel meaningless. Both poles are exaggerations, yet both diagnose real incentives: firms treat labor as a cost to be minimized; workers experience much labor as a burden to be escaped.

Pursued to their limits, these ideals devour the very purposes of economic activity. If production casts people as obstacles, it forgets that the point of producing is human flourishing. If income severs from contribution, it erodes the social bonds that make prosperity sustainable. The tension is not laziness versus greed; it is alienation versus efficiency. People seek income without work when work offers no mastery, community, or purpose. Employers seek production without employees when accounting frameworks ignore the developmental value of work and the knowledge embodied in workers.

The constructive task is to realign institutions so that efficiency serves, rather than displaces, human development. That means designing technology to complement rather than replace workers, removing drudgery while enhancing judgment and craft. It means forms of ownership and governance, co-determination, cooperatives, profit-sharing, employee stock plans, that turn employees into partners in productivity gains. It means metrics beyond output and margins: capability building, well-being, ecological balance, and time sovereignty. Social floors, portable benefits, and lifelong learning reduce the fear that makes both sides cling to extreme strategies.

When work is dignified and fairly rewarded, the opposing ideals lose their lure. Employers stop dreaming of humanless factories because people add value beyond cost; employees stop dreaming of workless income because contribution becomes a source of identity and freedom. Economics, then, becomes a human art, not merely a machine for more.