Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
It my magical fantasy world a progressive consumption tax would likely be the best way to deal with income inequality which would pay for a guaranteed income.
This issue though exists with or without the discussion around automation. The question of distribution of wealth within a capitalist society has always been and will always be an issue. The goal should be to perform this equalization in a way that hits economic expansion in as minimal of way as possible.
The problem with limiting automation is that you are paying someone to do nothing but making them do something. This means they can't be doing something else. We also then need to train people to replace the people doing nothing thus investing shared resources into the creation of nothing. If we are going to pay someone to do nothing lets pay them to do nothing and maybe in their spare time they will find something to do.
Essentially as confusing as the above paragraph is if we have to pay people to do nothing we need to be as efficient about it as possible. Limiting automation is the least efficient way to pay someone to do nothing.
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I can appreciate where you are coming from, but the fact is when people lose their jobs they can't exactly be counted on to cover equalization. With less and less people being employed, the employers will be required to pay for more and more people to not be employed by them. When you have real people working for you and you expand you are reinvesting into the economy. When you eliminate jobs but are still expanding you are investing solely in yourself, if you need to pay more for equalization so that you are able to maintain customers/revenue it seems to me like eventually you will be losing on that if more and more people are out of work.
I can see your point of paying someone to do nothing instead of using a machine, but if you choose to pay for that machine instead, under your suggestion you will still be paying people to do nothing.
I can understand everyone's concern with businesses choosing then to instead invest into foreign markets, but I really believe that this will eventually become a global issue and if we don't address the issue sooner rather than later, we could eventually find ourselves in a situation we can't get ourselves out of. If we get to a point where employers have the ability to dictate our quality of life or how much they need to give up to do so because we've lost all leverage due to the fact that they can operate without workers what will equalization really look like?