By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent federal tax receipts or ... what exactly?
But ok look at it this way... What is silly about taxing a sector that is undertaxed because the current system assumed income taxes?
It's a matter of perspective. I'm pretty sure that from their perspective those people very much need to work because they need to pay taxes, rent, insurance, food etc...
What mechanism is going to ensure that the increased productivity is going to result in lower cost of living for these people such that they no longer require to spend so much of their life working to survive?
That's a pretty Matrix "human-battery" level attitude to your fellow brothers and sisters. "They need to work to pay taxes, rent, and insurance". Ie, they only exist and are allowed to live to be serfs - or cattle really.
- healthcare
- armed forces
- road/utility maintenance
bacially everything funded by taxes
The value of labor is dependent on the demand of that labor and tools increase demand by increasing what projects can be done.
Same as when one developer with AI can do the job of 3 developers and the other 2 are fired.
In my anecdotal experience moving piles of dirt manually (for large piles of dirt) it is generally the digging up of the dirt that takes the most effort, if I had to move it with buckets or a wheelbarrow I would still expect that to be the case.
I would furthermore expect that there are some functions at work in modelling the moving of large piles of dirt using manual labor.
Your model may make sense with a small pile of dirt but I don't think you will find 1 remains and 2 go, at best 1 goes and you take a bit longer to move the pile.
Also, this is just my observations of having had large piles of dirt to move with manual labor (including wheelbarrows and several of those) As you scale up the amount of people you could drop by adding wheelbarrows goes down, because again the main problem is the digging. The wheelbarrows becomes a thing you trade off diggers on running. You will want to have more wheelbarrows that wheelbarrow users so that diggers can fill wheelbarrows while the users are running the already filled wheelbarrows to where the dirt is being dumped.
At this point then you would probably want to drop the wheelbarrow analogy and go to a backhoe and a truck, but then all of the various observations of the other flaws in the wheelbarrow argument become apparent, such as the factories to build backhoes and trucks, the training for backhoe operator etc. All leading to a relatively strong argument that existence of backhoes and trucks are a boost to the environment, potential job creator and those jobs will be more skilled jobs leading to higher wages in the economy.
Hold on now, how will 'trickle-down' economics work then ? Think of the poor companies trying to provide a living for all those AI. /s
The thing is companies and even self-employed individuals of a certain wealth level know how to "(ab)use" it. From illegal but trivial and hard to detect tax evasion to financing personal lifestyle by having the company pay for certain luxuries (cars, computers, furniture, etc.).
If you have the wealth to have a dedicated office that dedicated office can be your man cave if you justify it with having all sorts of amenities for customers. And good luck to whoever checks taxes to find out how exactly things are used/not used.
All of that usually means that companies, company owners and high ranking managers get away with not paying taxes for a lot of things that everyone else does simply because they don't have a say within these companies.
And all of that is before you go to the tax advisor.
I am sorry, but if you do hard honest work the chances of you getting rich are beyond slim. Even worse when you do something that actually benefits society.
That's unique in human history
Sadly not unique in human history.
AI is on track to being able to remove a society-changing amount of jobs, wheel barrows improved worker's efficiency.
Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them.
Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step.
Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.
We, as a society, allow corporations to pull resources from the commons because the other side of it is that their existence provides a value through jobs and tax revenue and such.
If the equation shifts such that the benefits dry up, but the downsides only increase, why should we allow that?
The solution could be as simple as higher business taxes or as wild as universal basic income.
It could be something like all AI is forced to be open source, open weight, free at least as far as the knowledge parts.
There's certainly no God given right to exclusively benefit from an invention. We allow that for as long as we care to.
And there's nothing illogical about changing these decisions as factors change.
I am deeply sceptical of the idea that 99% of us are suddenly going to be idle any day now, so I think endless think pieces on what we should do when that day arrives are kind of pointless. But it is certainly obvious that if it did happen, we would have to reassess how we do stuff.
We don't let corporations do anything because they provide value through jobs and taxes. What company do you know that exists (beyond transiently) solely by paying taxes and employing people?
Companies are an extension of the individual, they exist to make money for the individuals that own them so that those individuals can acquire goods and services that they themselves need or desire.
How do companies make this money? Holding people at gun point and taking it is generally illegal; instead they resort to providing goods or services to some set of people who are willing to pay for them.
To provide these goods or services they need to employ people. The fewer people companies in aggregate can employ, the better for people in aggregate since those people can acquire "things" (food, jewellery, phones,...) for less of their own labour (or equivalent dollars).
If the "benefits dry up" as you say, people will stop sending their hard earned money to this company and the company will eventually cease to exist. Your fallacy was assuming the benefits were the jobs and taxes, not the goods and services provided.
Corporations don’t have to exist; they are a creation of society and thus can - and I think obviously- should be changed
Certain configurations of the corporation are described in our laws, e.g. "limited liability".
Wolves predate towns but we choose to not allow them in towns.
That has existed for millions of years already. First as hunting companies, then as raiding companies. It exists in other species as well. It will never go away. It has existed in every human society, no matter what political or economical ideology.
The real question is how companies should be organized and owned.
Clearly we're talking about a specific modern legal entity with a specific organization that, as you say, can change.
It will not take longer than until sunrise next morning before all those corporations are now different single individuals who contract their whole company structure again and now have everything from job contracts to investor contracts in their own names instead, using probably the same kind of complicated contracts that preceded the modern corporation as a legal entity. What did you benefit?
All of what you said can be true and also others can and do decide to allow or disallow a group to exist.
social unrest must be priced in at this point somewhere
2. I never said tax is the end all be all of the situation. It’s one attribute we can use to combat AI take over and wealth inequality in the face of a multitude of solutions that can be executed. It is not consistent with logic as shown by the wheel barrow example and I am saying it doesn’t need to be. Understand?
If you want to live in the best real estate in the world and expect to continue doing so when you have no job, that's not going to happen. If you're willing to adapt and spread out you can live better and freer than ever in a hypothetical world where AI has taken most jobs.
https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/what-is-the-k-shaped-economy-...