>>Realistically speaking, between automation and web-based self service technologies, more and more jobs are becoming redundant every day. One robotics tech can maintain robots who do the job of fifty workers with wrenches and spray guns.
That’s the fantasy of business leaders. The reality of automation is that it costs a lot more than just hiring that one magical tech. In very light industry, that might be possible, but as the industry gets heavier, the number of techs required grows. If your operation expands beyond the 40 hour week, you need more techs. If quality is important,,you need more techs. Automation does give you cost savings, but it mostly just shifts costs from one part of the cost of doing business to another.
>>Instead of living in a fantasy world where 1950’a assembly lines magically reappear, conservatives should be seriously thinking about how a capitalist economy will look when we can produce everything we produce today, with 30-50 percent less employment.
I agree. The present conservative answer is “no welfare” and no work. I would love to hear real solutions to the problem of maintaining national sovereignty while outsourcing our industry to the “cheap world”. But, we force everyone into one of two camps: free traders or stinking communists. It’s as if there is no middle ground.
Let's try cutting the corporate income tax by about two-thirds, rolling back the regulatory burden (FTC, EPA, EEOC, OSHA etc) to what it was in about 1975, and ashcanning Obamacare.
If that doesn't start increasing employment in a couple of years, I'll talk about excise taxes. But not before.