*That'll* put an end to offshoring!
...or maybe not. Some of the most incomprehensible bloatware I've ever seen came from offshore.
But you raise a serious point. Who determines what is "useful" work, especially as the private sector gets crowded out and a labyrinthine order of "set asides" and other quotas reserves occupational lebensraum for members of preferred victim groups. To be laid off is to die.
...and we eagerly anticipate the lovely spectacle of slots being reserved for such vital things as Princeton University's The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines “prostitutes,” “cross-dressing,” and “same-sex eroticism” in 16th - and 17th - century England, France, Italy and Spain
Whether this will lead to a dystopia such as that in Canticle for Leibowitz, or merely the tragic death of an itinerant civilization due to the regrettable and unenlighted omission of telephone sanitizers, as related by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, is beyond me.
Cheers!
Slippery slope.