Harold Meyerson says we should fear the job-killing impact of technological advance as driverless vehicles (for example) might reduce the demand for human labor. From the right, Howard Foster recently argued that rather than worry about robots crowding out human labor, we should worry about human crowding out human labor and deport immigrants to boost demand for domestic labor. Adam Ozimek observed in response to Foster, that by this logic a country can boost domestic prosperity by banning all imports of foreign goods.
A lot of political debate in the United States seems to me to take the form of people not understanding that these three proposals — ban the goods, ban the human production inputs, and ban the capital production inputs — are all basically the same. After all, nobody (I hope) thinks we should do all three of these things simultaneously. It is, however, true that they have full employment in Antarctica:
At any rate, if we could produce all the goods and services we need to sustain prosperous existence without anyone doing market production, then we’d all live in a communist utopia. If we needed a very tiny amount of market production, then there’d be no reason to believe that high taxes are reducing labor supply and we’d have super-high rates and we’d all live in a welfare state utopia.
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