It's not a Ponzi scheme. You simply tax the thing (savings from firing humans) that is increasingly eating the lunch of the other thing (humans being employed), which you want to subsidize, because of a constraint libertarians don't mention (we want all humans to live even if demand for their labor is low).
Here's what you do:
1) Tax the monetary gains made by corporations from greater automation, not enough to disincentivize R&D, but enough to counteract inflation from step #2.
2) Institute an unconditional basic income, like Alaska already does for natural resources. Everyone gets a check in the mail.
You balance #1 and #2 so there is no net inflation. The more corporations lay people off in the aggregate, the more wages will be replaced by UBI.
Re:Unnecessariat
by vintermann on Wednesday May 25, 2016 @08:23AM
(#11769237)
We can't divorce the need for human labor from distributional concerns. For all we know, in the future the extremely rich will place a premium on "hand-made" luxury yachts, even if the autonomous robots they own could do it far cheaper. Human labor won't be totally unnecessary in such a world, but it would still be a miserable world.
Well, taxation is theft, so that is the easy answer to that. :-)
But to dig a little deeper... a UBI is an interesting concept, and especially so when one considers a future where most, or even all, human labor becomes unneeded. In a world of 100% technological unemployment, it does seem that we're going to require a different system than what we have now. But I don't think just saying "have an UBI" is much of an answer, because - IMO - the entire fundamental basis of the economy will be so radically different that we can't even imagine how the UBI will be funded and how the economy will work.
I keep running through scenarios, trying to come up with a scenario that makes sense, even hand-waving around the "initiation of force" issue temporarily, and it always seems to come out looking like a Ponzi scheme in the end.
Luckily, I think we're still quite a ways away from the total obviation of need for human labor, so we have some time to figure it out. Well, hopefully anyway.