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You cannot gaze into a healthy market economy and second guess it.

If you try, and you are the government, it is highly likely you will do net damage.

Today one worker only monitors ten computer-controlled machining centers, and his only job is to load materials and tools, and remove finished parts. To make things worse, this machining cannot be done by hand anymore. Nine machinists are looking for a job now.

That is a market optimization. Those former machinists should now be doing something else that computer-controlled machining centers cannot do. If they are smart enough to be machinists, that shouldn't be a problem. Of course, if they insist on remaining machinists, then we count the weeks, up to 99 or whatever.

And, as to the Bishop of Rome, I care about the magnitude of my net worth, not the ratio of Mr Bill's net worth to mine. He needs to shut up and focus his intellectual bandwidth on transubstantiation.

You cannot gaze into a healthy market economy and second guess it. If you try, and you are the government, it is highly likely you will do net damage.

I guess we learned that lesson pretty well with Obamacare. Hundreds of private insurance products got reduced to three, simply because the Emperor said so.

Those former machinists should now be doing something else that computer-controlled machining centers cannot do. If they are smart enough to be machinists, that shouldn't be a problem

There are two problems right here:

1. There is not enough demand for machining in the whole world. One machinist can supply all the parts. Other machinists, even if they are capable, are not needed. There are no even mills for them to work on. You can say the same about every job - there are only so many stores to be a clerk at, so many banks, so many fast food joints... even writers compete for reader's attention. The manufacturing can be so efficient that it floods the market or runs out of the raw materials.

2. Not everyone is capable of learning the higher skill. What if the new machines have to be telepathically controlled, and only 20% of the population are capable of telepathy?

There is no known solution to this problem. Currently the USA is using a passive approach of supplying the unlucky workers with some minimum money, so that they don't grab torches and pitchforks yet. This solution is a social poison, and it doesn't really solve the problem. For example, in the near future all stores will be online, ran by computers; all services will be automated; where will a common man be employed at to earn money to buy all those goods? These goods are not free, as in Communism - someone has to invest into those automated factories, and some people will be working there, if only to maintain the machines.

The worst part of this problem is not even money. The absolute worst here is the fact that tens of millions of workers will be sitting at home for weeks, staring into the telescreen, and eating Ramen noodles. Can you imagine what that will do to their mind? It is perfectly clear why ghetto kids do all the crime. Idle hands and all that. Even if we manage to skip to the ideal Communism, where robots do *everything* for us, the human society will go crazy.

And, as to the Bishop of Rome...

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night.
And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.
Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 1651