So you're saying to steal from Tom to give to Paul? That makes so much sense because it's the moral thing to do.

It's called society. Nobody is penalized by having only $1000000 in their bank account instead of $100000000. Especially since that money is earned on the backs of people who work just as hard and only earn a fraction of it.

If you want meritocracy you should also recognize that people who earn a billion do not work harder or are smarter than people who "only" make a million  a year.

Wealth has gotten out of hand and for the good of all society it should be mended.

The moral thing to do is to support the weakest people in your society. You know, the thing that the super wealthy do not do.

There are 3 million truckdrivers in the US alone. 3 million more people who will lose their job in 10-15 years. And that's from a single profession. You can't seriously think that all the jobs that will be replaced by automation and AI will be compensated for...

No problem. Those 3 million Truck drivers will just become programmers and mechanics for the robot cars. Because those don't exist right now.

Yeah whoops, forgot about that. It's completely feasible for the vast majority of the human population to be scientists and programmers.

Wait...

The time isn't ripe for universal basic income just yet. But someday, something similar to universal basic income will be inevitable. It may take another 10, 20, 50, 100 or even 200 years - in the complete history of the world, that's little more than a blink of the eye.

All it takes is a critical mass of people losing their belief in the "american dream religion". People will only believe in that religion as long as they believe that they too are - or at least someday will be - among the winners of that ideology.

Mass unemployment, for example caused by rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence, has a great chance of shattering that illusion to pieces.
So whoever wishes for universal basic income should wish for rapid mass unemployment, because that's what will change people's minds.

Go ask it to those 5 million people who lost their jobs in the industry thanks to automation. 



The first one is the newest one but I am not sure people can see the graph so posted a slightly older one aswell.

Around the 2000 is when automation in software started to become a thing aswell and since then even when we have 8 years of economic growth the economic participation rate is hardly going up (last newest job report stated that it was still stable but at the same time the unemployment number went up).

Economic growth is coming less from the need of new workforce => but of investments in automation/Software. 

We are lucky because we are living in well developped nations but globably the unemployment numbers are rising fast thanks to automation/software and most interesting part is that those invesments are still overall very expensive but because of so many new companies working on new automation/software we could see those prices going down fast in the next couple of years and making it for companies more feasible to invest in them.

A billionairre becomes a billionairre by providing products and services that other people want. If it's done through free trade and not some green energy government subsidy, then who have they hurt/exploited?

"that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together."

Capitalism 101 - Prices fall making everyone richer. You don't have to work as many hours for the same goods/services.

The robophobia in this thread is scary. If leftists had the first clue about free trade and the damage they cause by getting in it's way, they wouldn't be leftists.

Totally automations fault. That cliff edge in 07/08 has nothing to do with the financial collapse.