Argumentation in favor of Socialism is already being done by 0bamabots.
People have been automating stuff for centuries and it hasn’t caused universal unemployment yet. (Take stream-powered water pumping and felting for example) How long do they project this shift is going to take? Another 500 years? Cause it certainly doesn’t seem to be working that way so far.
Ask them for an example of a country where communism, socialism, fascism has lasted more than three or four generations. USSR lasted 70-80 years but there were two World Wars to divert attention from problems.
To be truthful, Cuba is nearing an exception to this, but they are geographically isolated and more easily controlled from outside influences. That said, it is no testament that so many of its captive citizens have gone to extraordinary measure to leave there, the IRON CURTAIN having been replaced by the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding.
Look further at South America now and see how governments like that are doing. Tell them to Google “toilet paper shortage” “food shortage” and so on as well as foreign loan debt and inflation.
It’s a no brainer.
BTW, why in the heck are you even talking to these people?
Automation is simply a step in manufacturing and has nothing to do with economic policy.
Plenty of jobs have been made obsolete by machinery over the course of history. This is called “progress” and “productivity increases.”
In general, progress is good for society because it allows greater economic output with fewer inputs, resulting in greater wealth for all classes.
Now - your Obamabots probably view “progress” as an opportunity to sit on their collective arses and collect Obamaphones and EBT cards. The rest of us view it as an opportunity to do bigger and better things. For example, if you had a lawn mowing robot, would you use the time you normally spent mowing your lawn to watch cat videos on the internet? If the answer is “yes,” then your colleagues are right - we’re doomed and only handouts will help us. If, instead, your colleagues aren’t lazy pieces of sh!t, then they’ll find a way to add value to society with the extra free time that increased productivity brings.
Simple as that.
I don’t know about having to go to socialism, but we are going to have to figure out a way to operate with most folks not having jobs, and having lots of stuff for acquisition in spite of nobody having jobs.
Yes, as always technology will outdate some jobs- do you see many classifieds for ‘horse and buggy whip manufacturing?” but its super short sighted to think that new technologies will not create new jobs that support those technologies. As long as people still want ‘thingies’ there will be jobs to harvest raw materials for ‘thingies’, create ‘thingies’, market ‘thingies’, adapt ‘thingies’, repair ‘thingies’. While the basics for sustaining life will probably require less effort in the future this will not decrease demand for other items. Did the Car create or destroy jobs? Did the internet destroy jobs or create more jobs? The jobs will change, but capitalism is still the best method for producing and distributing across a society.
Automation is the future, but along with automation comes new jobs, building them, programing them, repairing them. training Operators etc.
Under socialism there is no way to calculate prices and therefore n way to allocate resources. Only a free market can correctly determine value. The USSR at least had the West as a reference point for such. This is probably the one reason that socialism cannot work even if you can remake man, which can’t be done. See Ludwig von Mises. mises.org
How do you get the machines that do the Automation?..how do you maintain the machines to do the automation?...
People running your own life does not end because you add a labor saving device..you use labor saving devices to create things of value..
...this view of the left comes through their assumption that the vast majority of people are nothing but vegetables that they need to control
Ask them why China adopted capitalism and has largely prospered with it. They may argue China is socialism, but the economic engine for generating wealth is largely capitalism. European socialism is also dependent on capitalism even if they won’t admit it. Socialist play word games or tell outright lies. Socialism requires a repressive government to impose it, which is what we see happening in our own country. From top to bottom, socialism is being crammed down our throats, and young people indoctrinated to maintain it.
Whenever you cite examples of how socialism has failed miserably wherever implemented (Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, East Germany, North Korea, Vietnam) you can count on being told that
“True socialism hasn’t been tried yet!!!”
Applied socialism doesn’t count, only theoretical `faculty lounge’ socialism matters. Human failure doesn’t invalidate the theory. And to these people, the theory is sacred.
In other words, you’re attacking somebody’s religion when you criticize socialism. Expect the rage of the faithful when you do.
My view of the essential wrongness of socialistic theory is that it attempts to deny human nature by preaching that a model of man that is unselfish, unmaterialistic, and nonindividualistic is possible in the scheme of things of the New Order of socialism.
You can’t.
You accept their IDIOTIC, ASININE assumption that the rich pay taxes.
Taxes are a cost of doing business and are passed along to the weakest- the poor. All taxes.
So, where does the money to pay for socialism come from?
Ask yourself:
“Where did my rich boss, banker, grocer, landlord get the money for that nice car?”
He got it from you or a customer.
And that’s where he gets the money to pay his taxes.
This attitude begins with the assumption that buyers will buy just so much and no more, then it follows that if now that given quantity of goods can be produced with less labor because of the adoption of labor-saving machinery, then there will be correspondingly less work available for people to do, and thus that improvements in machinery cause unemployment.But there is not a fixed amount of work to be done and there is not a fixed quantity of output that is demanded.
The actual effect of the adoption of labor-saving machinery is to cause not unemployment but a higher standard of living. In the economy as a whole in the long run,the effect of the adoption of labor-saving improvements is that the same number of workers end up reducing vastly increased quantity of goods and obtain the benefit of these goods in their capacity a consumers. Improvements in machinery of the labor-saving variety are an essential prerequisite of labor becoming available for increasing the production of goods previously considered luxuries and for working with improvements in machinery or the kind that make possible altogether new products.
There will be no problem of a lack of demand for these additional goods. Because the need and desire for goods always far outstrips the ability to produce goods and increases further as that ability increase. Also, the actual true aggregate demand curve shows that even any given quantity of money and volume of spending is potentially capable of buying an unlimited quantity of goods at lower prices. No matter how great the output becomes at the point of full employment, it will be demanded.
But as Still Thinking points out, we have been automating for a long time and sometimes it does cause labor dislocations but the market has a way of eventually bouncing back and redistributing labor to productive areas.
I don't think that risk is a carte blanch to implement all socialist programs, much less all socialist programs now. But it is likely that safety nets and retraining programs may have to be expanded until the market can respond.
What's more, we have to find a way to finance those programs as unemployed people will not be paying either income tax or consumption taxes.
One of my frustrations is that America has lowered it import tariffs resulting in high unemployment. Our market has been flooded with cheap imports from countries with much lower labor costs than ours. Our tariffs are so low that we actually create a tax incentive to off-shore our industries, as if the wage differential between countries wasn't enough.
Thus we are already at crisis unemployment levels and it's not the result of automation but rather stupid government policies when it comes to international trade.
Automation can make this much much worse. Automation itself will likely create jobs but not nearly as much as it displaces.
Automation will transition us even more to Peter Drucker's "Dream Economy" where entertainment pursuits consume and employ a much larger amount of the economy.
I think the socialists are right that things will get much worse employment-wise due to automation. This is true even if we fixed our stupid trade policies, which neither party seems inclined to do. But Capitalism is still by far the best reallocator of resources to productive use. Any social programs that we implement should be temporary until the market conditions can adjust. We should never embrace full socialism. And one only needs to look at the history of socialistic states and planned economies to know why.
Few quick thoughts:
1: Nobody can predict the future. But their socio-economic predictions, so far, have been as completely wrong as it is possible to be. The utopian societies of Mao and Pol Pot have instead resulted in the mass starvation they wish to invoke and the deaths of millions in countless other horrific ways. And the solution is NEVER to re-examine the inherent value of their assumptions, but to claim that “if only we/they had the right people in charge”.
2: In an environment like a McDonalds, say, it would perhaps be possible to completely automate the entire operation. But in an operation like building a house, even if like 1955 Levittown, LI, the houses were essentially identical, the build can not be automated. OK, so we build identical dwellings in a factory and truck to the site. But as we have seen, humans have a need to be occupied in some way, so inevitably, once their vision has manifested itself and all tasks are automated, then these idle humans will have to be placed into mass-agricultural positions or as Milton Friedman observed, building things using spoons instead of shovels.
3: We have already lost millions of jobs since 2008 and it has resulted in discomfort, yes, and dislocation, but unless these things happen to YOU, then these kinds of broad-brush statements ignore the reality that a detached, intellectual class is here seeking to impose an intellectually-derived and self-arrogated platform of moral superiority (fending off the starvation of millions, they are, dontcha know) that sadistically consigns the people so affected to lives of the dullest form of uniformity and conformity imaginable. Their ideal seems to be a society much like that of North Korea. Is this some kind of vision they wish to sell? What is the attraction? The attraction is that the picture fits into their shriveled little inexperienced brains while the untold misery it has, in every instance, inflicted upon the poor victims of same, is NEVER considered. That it is never considered is proof positive that these are cold, unfeeling would-be overlord types who CAN’T EVEN FIGURE OUT that m,any of them, indeed, would be harvesting the rice in the same rice fields as those poor souls they wish to save from starvation. Again, that that they cannot even see that is proof positive that their theory is phenomenally myopic. It takes in very very little of what we KNOW about human nature (whatever that means to you, and them)
And, in these utopias, is there not still a distinct class of overlords or commandants who can impose their will on one or more or any number of drones by fiat? So instead of simply living your life as a worker bee, your superiors can come around and crush your skull with a rifle butt or just shoot you. Is that even better than the prospect of mere enforced conformity? Born as you are in the worker bee class, the chances of you ascending to that glorified plane are zero. You will live your life until the state has decided that you have no more economic value and since there is no morality nor any other reason to live, your next phase will be similar to that of garden fertilizer. Why this would be any sort of compelling utopia, forgive me, but I frankly don’t see it.
They said the same things when industrial factories appeared at the turn of the last century and every other improvement in making things before that.
“Steam-powered looms!? You are going to lay off most of your workforce, you evil suit! Tis the devil’s work!” - Luddites.
Just read some Bastiat and such. Good stuff.
People who are too stupid to adapt to the new job market as a result of automation deserve to starve to death on the streets. If the birth rates of the poor outpace the birth rates of the wealthy, socialism would collapse by running out of money; in a world where egalitarianism is enforced at the point of a gun, who in their right mind would bother to work?
Of course, there is also the question of whether or not automation is possible or inevitable. Self-sustaining AI as applied to something practical has not yet been invented; if we are talking about replacing 20 workers with 5 workers and machines, the business would have to incur a number of short-term costs, which will sour many investors (and let’s not even get into government attempts to sabotage automation in the name of votes and union money).