The obvious historic parallel to our digital and technological revolution currently remaking our world is the advent of the Industrial Revolution which dislocated whole populations as it eliminated traditional ways of sustaining life. In the modern age Western societies, for good or for ill, demand the government intervene to cushion dislocations generated by technological change. You raise the question whether governments are capable of coping with the scope of dislocations which are bound to occur as we move into a society in which wealth is increasingly created by robots and software.
Our social safety net society is peculiarly vulnerable to such change because so many of our social welfare programs rest on the foundation of employment. If workers are displaced for robots, what happens to the Social Security system? What happens to healthcare funded at the workplace? How can society be made to work if the social net is kept in place for those who do not work because robots are now doing their job? When a robot becomes obsolete with age does its employer pay a pension to the individual who lost his job to that robot? If not, what happens to our aged?
Obama's solution only makes the problem worse and of course that is the solution being imposed on us tyrannically, to import millions of uneducated (you should excuse the expression, Congresswoman Bachmann), illiterate and unskilled alien workers to fund Social Security and the rest of the social safety net. I think that scheme was tried by a fellow named Ponzi and it came to grief. Both the solution and the process which brings us this solution are, I fear, a model for future solutions be pushed by the left.
Elizabeth Warren tells us that we have no right to that wealth our robots might generate because " you didn't build that" and that song is going to become more and more popular as displaced people seize on it to rationalize government compelling wealth transfers to themselves.
History tells us that the dislocations of Dickensian horrors of the early Industrial Revolution in England should not be allowed to happen to us. Certainly, the people will not permit the government to stand idly by without "fixing" the problem, making things more "fair" and in exchange a huge chunk personal liberty will be readily sacrificed. Government will be only too eager to "manage" these dislocations but it is up to conservatives to preserve liberty while they do so.
I have no answer, I do not know how conservative values of liberty and preservation of property can be maintained in such an atmosphere. Clearly, the idea of basing the social net on employment will not survive. The idea of keeping wealth must somehow survive.
As to globalization, the United States is taking a knife to a gunfight because our leaders, beginning with George Bush Senior and Junior and right on through to today were oriented not as trustees with a fiduciary duty to their nation state, but as pioneers of one world global market. Philosophically, they saw no harm in sacrificing national advantage for the greater long-term goal of globalization. In dealing with the Chinese, the United States has exhibited an astonishing level of naïveté. History will undoubtedly someday reveal that the United States trade posture with China is also the product of an enormous degree of corruption.
The Chinese are making war by other means and we are making nice. Eventually this rubber band, like the rubber band holding the social safety net together in the face of technological change, will tear asunder.
