alt Hacker NewsThat is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.