While we're being honest, if you're working for a living rather than living off investments (i.e. the labor of others) you are nowhere near to the top of the heap.

If you're living off the labor of others, opening the immigration floodgates is great news. More workers to play off against one another. H1-Bs are even better news.

We both know that importing the best Bangladeshi talent to the United States because it's 50% cheaper than the average American is not going to help the average impoverished Bangladeshi. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Fixed that for you. FYI, I'm an American working for an Indian company. So according to your theory, I'm the one being happily exploited by global trade.

By the way, according to your github profile, you live in Singapore. You were born there (Colm O'connor sounds like a very Singaporean name) and never plan to leave, right? Or is this a situation of "restrict their freedom to move, but not mine"?

> [you're] willing to cause millions to suffer dire poverty in order to mitigate [your] feelings of envy

> By the way, according to your github profile, you live in Singapore

These things cross the line. It's fine to have a contrarian view but please don't put an acerbic and personal spin on it when posting here.

Jobs.

If you want to argue that consumption has dropped, do it. So far no one else here has.

What was asked was is an approach to zero unemployment ok, and could you imagine any vectors of approach to that condition being bad, and do we have any negative societal examples at or about that state of affairs? The answer is obvious, meaning we have more data points about that situation than your proposed robo-utopia as the only convergent solution, and since we have data on that condition, states resembling it are far more probable than your proposed unitary ideal.

Idealism should always be suspect in things involving humans: economics, philosophy, ideals, political parties...anything involving large sums of humans that proposes the exact solution should always be looked at as extremely suspect. Political romanticism and One True Answers are the historical places where the body bags are. I distrust pure libertarianism, pure socialism, pure democracy, and any political philosophy that promises me A Perfect World.

I say that as a strong political supporter of both Ron and Rand Paul.

It was Aswanson who raised the apocalyptic scenario of no jobs, presumably because all our material needs are taken care of by robots or Chinese people, not me.

Not even close. That's your current redefintion of the argument. Scroll up. The thread started off as a set of defensive/offensive prescriptions given the current macro state of affairs, which led to the labor implications of free trade, which led to your utopian exposition of the only possible configuration of free labor. You were asked about other possible configurations of this state, and no apocalypse was mentioned at all.

In addition, you ended with the only way this could happen would be if the chinese and robots take care of everything, and nothing could possibly ever go wrong along that direction of displacement of the workforce...because...because...I dunno...libertarianism. So, asking again, do we have evidence of the robot/Chinese paradise being the only end-game, or are there other paths that things can evolve into?

Which is why I found it so funny that Bernie Sanders complains about Vietnamese workers (he even called them out by name!).

I'm used to seeing race-baiting from politicians of all stripes. I just wasn't used to seeing it from self-described "actual socialists".

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/bernie-sanders-to-obama-on-ni...

Also, I am not complaining - I am doing pretty well for myself, thanks.

My other answer (to thomasfoster96) has more details on how free trade with Asia jacks up the labor pool.