It's not the person who uses the machine that multiplies their effort that make ridiculous amounts of money, it's the the owners of the machines that do.
The obvious solution to this is that the person who uses the machine should also own it. Which means that people who think of themselves as "labor" should be looking for industries where they can own the technology that multiplies their productivity. Such as, just an example off the top of my head, programming. :-)
I don't know about you, but my employer owns my work product via an intellectual property assignment agreement, that I signed as a condition of employment. In addition, our operation requires very expensive datacenters, which they clearly own, not any of the employees. Or even all of the employees, taken together.
So, I write programs, but I neither own them nor the systems that are required to run them. Taken collectively, the employees at my job have created a very profitable machine, in that it brings in revenue that greatly exceeds the market cost of building the machine. This profit goes to shareholders, not employees, and an employee by virtue of an employee will not receive any share of the revenue created by their work after they leave their company.
Yes, I am partially paid in stock, and this means I am at times part-owner. But this can be seen as a coincidence and doesn't really significantly alter the power dynamic. I say this because it is ultimately part of our compensation, and the fact that they choose to pay us some shares (and correspondingly less cash) is more of an accounting trick then a fundamental shift in the employee-employer relation.
That doesn't keep ypu from buying the means of production, a computer and doing programming on your own. And the what you produce will be yours if you protect it the way your employer protected the work that he paid you to produce for him.
I should have specified free-lance programming or programming in a startup, where you're a founder or an early employee. You're right that programming in a lot of companies doesn't have the same ownership structure.
I also agree with your remarks about being "paid" in stock instead of cash. I worked for a company (not an IT company) that "paid" us in stock options, and insisted that the "cash value" was equivalent, which was of course their excuse for not just giving us the cash. Of course, those options turned out to be worthless when the company's stock tanked. So yes, it was just an accounting trick.
The obvious solution to this is that the person who uses the machine should also own it. Which means that people who think of themselves as "labor" should be looking for industries where they can own the technology that multiplies their productivity. Such as, just an example off the top of my head, programming. :-)