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> Or we could hustle it out and have everyone desperately seek work to save their lives. Our choice. One leads to greater inequality.

This is a total non sequitur. Machines have been taking human jobs since the late 1800s and adding robots to take/process orders is no different. You discount the notion that new jobs will appear as "the free market argument," but new jobs will be created regardless of any tax on robot labor (negating the utility of such a tax) -- I suspect the driving factor here is the size of the unemployed workforce, not the need for money, ceteris paribus.

Moreover, the two problems you note (government and corporations influence on it) aren't policy or cultural problems (implementation details, if you will), they're problems with the fundamental nature of a powerful state and human society. Never has there existed a society where powerful institutions were not able to influence other, more powerful institutions (i.e. the state) with that said power, and as long as those institutions are run by men that cannot change. Individuals are generally corrupt (to some extent or another, if you give me $5 I'll shut up), and no amount of oversight or transparency will stop corruption so long as a critical amount of power supports that corruption. In simple terms, this is the tyranny of the majority, where "the majority" is measured in terms of power, not votes. This is the fundamental political dilemma, and limiting the scope of the state to only limiting the power of society's other powerful institutions is the only solution that solves this problem empirically, as opposed to the notion that corruption is ok as long as it promotes a certain set of ideals with which I agree.

> Machines have been taking human jobs since the late 1800s

I would add that humans have been paid to do repetitive, automated, routine work for ever, and they do so inefficiently. It's not human nature to stand in a production line for 8 to 12 hours straight placing screws somewhere.

There is something profoundly wrong with the life expectations of some if they are actually defending drone work.

> You discount the notion that...

I don't.

> I suspect the driving factor here is the size of the unemployed workforce, not the need for money

And the difference is? Fundamentally people work to pay bills.

> aren't policy or cultural problems

State is policy and human society is culture. You seem to think the latter terms imply some innate quality absent in the former, but they both change, and that is because they are one in the same. Both have changed rapidly, and it's called history.

> "the majority" is measured in terms of power, not votes.

You're describing corrupt nations. This is blatantly anti-democratic, and there are too many people working to change this in America who have already succeeded to bring us to where we are today, and who will continue to succeed to help build a better tomorrow.

Limiting power is not ideal. Power does not need to be contaminated or broken, and presuming that part of it will never change is discrediting everyone that got us here. It's okay not to be satisfied because that is what will take us even further. But we're not Brazil. And their problems won't go away just by limiting power of government.

The problem with these solutions is that production moves where it's cheaper. If you tax my robots, I'll just pack up and move them to another country where they are not taxed, or they are taxed less.

This argument applies to all kinds of taxes, right? If you tax labor, I'll just move my factory somewhere that labor isn't taxed. If you tax my income, I'll move myself to a lower-tax place. If you tax my land, I'll just buy land somewhere else. And so on.

Yet somehow most countries are able to tax labor, income, land, and so on, without losing their entire populations.

Not to say that people won't leave because of taxes. Just that there are also reasons that make people stay.

The issue has a lot to do with the finances of scale. Mom and pops aren't going anywhere, and neither are you, but Apple will go to Ireland, and wealthy individuals will bank in tax havens. And hence, the wealth gap widens. Most -- the "99%" -- stay and pay taxes. The 1% don't, but they look like they're still here. They just have one foot - the tax paying foot -- in Ireland.

An accountant recently confessed to me that many wealthy Californians do the same using Nevada. Just declare an NV home as your primary residence and make sure to document your time in NV (photos, flights, ATM receipts). CA income tax is 13.3% for the wealthy. NV is 0%.

If you are making let's say 10 mln a year, that means by lying that NV is your primary residence, you did not pay more than 1 mln in taxes. For getting back that kind of money, Criminal Investigation Bureau of Franchise Tax Board can afford keeping dedicated agent who will follow you and see how often do you actually go to NV and after couple weeks of surveillance when he sees that you do not go there much, he can get court order and:

- Look at your cell phone location information for last several months.

- Use Police's license plate trackers to track your car (Probably they do not even need court order for this one).

- They can get your car's location information (I assume high income people have one of modern expensive cars and most of them have tracker in case it is stolen).

- They can talk to your made(s) (I assume you have one, since you make 10+ mln) and pressure them to tell the true story.

Sounds really dangerous to lie about your location now days when it is so easy to check it, without even leaving the room.

You, in turn, donate $50k a year to politicians who work to cut the Franchise Tax Board's investigative budget.

Some things are easier than others. Technology is easy to move around, people aren't.

> Yet somehow most countries are able to tax labor, income, land, and so on, without losing their entire populations.

That's because most of the population aren't free to give everything up because a government gradually makes their life slightly worse.

Just because the frog doesn't skip out of the saucepan, it doesn't magically mean that it's perfectly acceptable to keep turning up the gas.

And then I'll introduce tariffs on goods produced using your robots.

These are, fundamentally, political-economic questions. Not merely one or the other.

That's how you start a trade war and kill trade aka the Trump solution.

To be fair Thomas Jefferson raised tariffs significantly. Most manufactured products simply stopped existing for consumers. All of that demand and no supply spurred the creation of a domestic manufacturing industry in a country that had previously only been useful for agriculture and raw materials.

Yes, but the US basically had an entire continent that was almost free for the taking, given the relatively light resistance that Native Americans were able to put up. Of course this land had to be farmed/mined/etc. to be productive, but it's far far easier to take economic risks when you have effectively unlimited quantities of a popular asset (land) at your disposal. I'd be very wary of generalizing from that situation to economic planning in general.

All I'm saying is that tariffs are not universally good or bad. Japan has ridiculous duties on rice because the farm lobby is super strong and the inevitable result of lowering those tariffs is a loss of livelihood for many people as well as the loss of traditionally grown and sourced rice. Is that bad for the economy and for consumers? Duh. But if the rest of the economy can support the inflated price of rice and the Japanese people prefer staying true to their roots, then that's their business.

Thomas Jefferson lived in a very different time. This is a hyper-connected world with a very complex web of trade and inter-dependencies. Simply putting up trade barriers is a sureshot way of isolating yourself from global trade, when has that ever worked out for anyone?

The choice between NK/Iranian levels of isolation and complete free trade is a false choice. Plenty of countries have high tariffs for certain types of goods and do just fine. Even today.

More-over, I hardly think a tariff on the output of robotic labor applied only to expats who left the country for tax reasons is going to cause a trade war...

A collapse of consumer demand will also kill trade.

That's a much better point. Consumer demand is paramount.

> I'll introduce tariffs on goods produced using your robots.

My robot submarines will run your coast guard surveillance and deliver goods tariff free.

What if we don't need your robots?

I mean, the Fed can conjure trillions of dollars of investment capital out of thin air, I think 350 million people have a fair chance of choosing to operate a magic building that makes their lives better.

Which is ultimately what we are talking about. Should we operate highly automated factories and how should we divvy up the benefits from them?

Seriously, we could have robots taking care of us. Free food delivery and a basic income for just being a citizen. Unfortunately this undermines much of what drives innovation and hence the economy as we know it... so though the math seems to work:

automated robots = free labor = us not having to do it + receive their products

... it just isn't that straight forward. Currently it's heading towards:

automated robots = free labor for business owners = us not having those jobs + them still getting what we would have produced

When everyone has lots of free time no one will innovate new forms of entertainment. /s

Correct. It's also the problem with taxes. Corporations move to where taxes are cheaper. But this doesn't mean there are no solutions.

Also, what cannot be ignored is the true drop in production costs because savings do get passed on to the consumer. This makes the politics difficult. If kittens died change would be much easier.

> Correct. It's also the problem with taxes. Corporations move to where taxes are cheaper.

Not just corporations. All tax payers try to pay the least they can.

There are professional accountants who make a living by filing personal tax returns, and people pay them to advise them on tax deductions and investment schemes that lowers their tax bill.

only problem is that is not what happens..

sure robots and factories move to China with no taxes at first..but than Chinese gov figures out to pay for other infrastructure improvements to have things like the USA they have to tax something and end up taxing robots anyway..in fact its already happening

And manufactures are already moving out of China to places like Indonesia and Vietnam.

And that’s why tariffs are a thing, and why the corporations are trying to push for free-trade-treaties just before the automation is happening.

What if I'll tax the stuff you robots make? Vat could be 80% or more if money was pumped back into economy in form of basic income.

I'm sure I read there is an upper bound to VAT, after which increases in fraud loose more than the tax increase.

Not sure. Most harmful VAT fraud is caused by specific schemes relying on faking costs. Those don't depend on rates.

Other way to avoid paying VAT would be to hide the sale altogether which might be hard for company that makes and sells tons of stuff made by robots.

Doesn't this just drive trading blocks of countries getting together to agree on common standards, like the EU?

Exactly

> but we survived because ultimately people find a way to make money.

Or more accurately, we just stopped caring about the people who can't.

And to treat our fears about inevitably joining them, the denigration starts. "well, they're just red state rednecks" "Poor folks should just learn more and work harder and pull those bootstraps" "if there's 5 jobs for 10 people, then the 10 people need to go back to school and get degrees, then they'll have 5 jobs for 10 people with degrees, which will be much better"

Pretty much this.

"Utopians on the coasts occasionally feel obliged to dream up some scheme whereby the unnecessariat become useful again, but its crap and nobody ever holds them to it. If you even think about it for a minute, it becomes obvious: what if Sanders (or your political savior of choice) had won? Would that fix the Ohio river valley? Would it bring back Youngstown Sheet and Tube, or something comparable that could pay off a mortgage? Would it end the drug game in Appalachia, New England, and the Great Plains? Would it call back the economic viability of small farms in Illinois, of ranching in Oklahoma and Kansas? Would it make a hardware store viable again in Iowa, or a bookstore in Nevada? Who even bothers to pretend anymore?"

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

wow, thanks for the link.

Robots are just machinery which can be taxed as property. We shouldn't create special tax categories for productivity tools or we'll start taxing shovels and perk scripts, too.

Precisely.

A single tractor is the sole responsible for eliminating the need for hiding a small brigade of farmhands or construction workers.

Efficiency shouldn't be taxed.

>They are productive assets, much like houses produce rent

The rent houses produce is very different from the money robots help you make. Rents (in the economic sense) are good to tax, can't be passed on to the tenant, and has no bad distortionary effects. If you tax robots, and don't do anything else, all that does is raise the prices of the goods produced by robots. It harms the consumer the most. If you tax robots enough, you can incentivize the owners to not use robots and hire humans instead. But then we're missing out on all the benefits of having a society where robots do the hard work, there's got to be a better way.

One solution would be to tax robots, and redistribute the taxed money back to the consumers. Everyone should benefit from the fruits of automation. This would probably work pretty well. The biggest issue here is that the government isn't known for being very good at redistributing tax revenue. So there are proposals like basic income to keep the process as simple as possible. There are probably even better options, like taxing the rents only, and taxing them very highly, and then paying that out as basic income. Theoretically this might target the people you want to be targeting, without harming the consumers. Obviously, theory only goes so far with this kind of thing. I think the point here is that taxation is tricky, and the burden of a tax is not necessarily on the person/company you're taking the money from. So "tax the robots" might not be the best thing, even though it has populist appeal.

If real estate producing rent is taxed it is definitely passed on to the tenant in the form of increased rent. It is just a cost of running a business.

Real estate taxes are in principle very similar to taxing a robot. It will be passed on to the consumer.

If you are referring to rental income being taxed (after all costs are deducted) then it is very similar to profits from robot assisted manufacturing being taxed. This will happen in the current tax regime in the US and here both are similarly situated as well.

I suspect their primary immediate concern politically is the graying Chinese workforce.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...

You mean something like an "imputed labour" tax kind of like some places charge income tax on "imputed rent" to homeowners?[0]

Though that may get messy as traditional human labour costs change. Maybe a straight-up imputed rent on the rental value of the machines?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent

Robots are capital. Real estate is mostly land. Capital produces interest. Land produces rent. These are different things.

However, if robots ever became fully autonomous and sentient, then owning them could be equivalent to slaveownership, and fundamentally immoral.

Slaveowners can be said to collect rent, because just like with owners of land titles, their profit comes not from production but from the government giving them privileges.

> Robots are capital. Real estate is mostly land. Capital produces interest. Land produces rent. These are different things.

Not according to neoclassical economics! Land is just another form of capital. I still don't understand why though. Some say it's political but that feels like too much of a conspiracy theory to me. There must be a good explanation but I haven't found it yet.

And the profit went to the shareholders - pensioners and 401k holders.

While most of the tax goes into bureaucracy.

The idea of taxing automation sounds like discouragement of increasing the efficiency. If anything we should subsidise it!