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And somewhere in that chain there must be a sizeable element that can't afford to purchase the end product.

You still haven't done anything but hand-wave about this. No proof has been presented.

Let's look at the computer industry as a classic example. When companies like IBM were the only ones making computers, most of the people making them were Americans but none of the people owning them were IBM "assembly-line" workers.

Today, IBM doesn't make any personal computers from the ground up -- if any assembly is done at all by IBM in the U.S., it is done using parts from outside suppliers. And yet nearly every IBM employee in the U.S. has a computer on his desk at work, and most of them probably have one or even more at home.

I don't understand why you can't accept this. You can look at almost any consumer product in use today and see the same trend at work. In fact, computers are a classic case in point -- because the desktop PC that is now a "consumer product" is more advanced by several orders of magnitude than machines that used to be called "high-end business equipment."