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I understand the point you're making, but I see issues with some of the details: i) in order for the factory to remain competitive domestically and internationally, it will need to reduce prices and increase production, otherwise someone else will use these robots to put them out of business (thus profits increase, but not by the amount saved by salaries), ii) if the government taxed this factory more, they would no longer be competitive internationally; further, this innovation would be disincentivized, iii) even if the government reclaimed all of the additional profits in taxes and gave them to the workers, there wouldn't be enough to go around (see first point), iv) perhaps this would accomplish the goal of narrowing the wealth divide, but it only does so by destroying wealth (factory owner ends up with less, workers end up with less).

I really don't believe this strategy will accomplish any of these objectives in the way you intend. I don't mean to pick on your example or opinion; apologies if I come off as harsh.

not at all - i'm certainly not capable of developing a new economic policy in the hacker news comment boxes :) i was merely pointing out via an example why the up-front ability of some people to own the means of production inevitably means that wealth will pool in their hands, and that something needs to be done at a government level to redistribute that wealth.

the bugbear of international competition simply means that everyone involved gets caught up in a race to the bottom; the fact is that this would simply be a progressive tax on leveraged ways of making money. there's always an incentive to make more at a lower cost and effort, whether some of that more is taxed or not. i would go as far as to say that it's a basic human drive. the sticking point is, once you have a setup so productive that you do not need other people to contribute to it, what happens to the displaced people?

the current model seems geared towards "deserving" the means to acquire necessities and luxuries, by contributing something to the system, whether the system needs them to or not. however that leads to very strong inequities where the rich get richer and the poor lead lives of ever-increasing desperation, including the need to perform menial jobs at a "loss" (i.e. getting less for them than the human cost of doing them).

i also do not believe my scheme would destroy wealth, for the following reason: $100 would let a poor person eat better, a middle-class person buy a better cellphone, and a rich person tip his blackjack dealer. my contention is that the $100 is therefore worth strictly more in the hands of the poor person, and that "destroying wealth" is an illusion caused by the fallacy that $100 is $100 regardless.

>the families to whom $400 was a lot of money would not, in any sane progressively-taxed system, be expected to pay that $400. the people to whom $400 was pocket change would.

but then it wouldn't be $400 per family...

read this: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit...

there's a lot of money pooled at the top, where it's pretty much doing nothing.

Using your analogy, let's say someone worked in the factory for a year before they were replaced by the robot. Are they entitled to completely stop working and earn that same salary for the next few decades? A year?

Ideally the use of a robot is supposed to bring down prices on what the factory makes, which redistributes the new wealth to everyone in society.

In real life, we've been shifting ever-more-steadily towards a rentier economy as actual production grows more and more efficient.

Something about your comment really struck me. In most sci-fi utopias, increasing automation was assumed to lead to cheaper marginal prices that gave everyone more leisure time. In reality the benefits from increasing automation (and globalization) have instead been naturally captured by those with the means (capital) to achieve them. Sounds a lot like we're either back on the road that Marx described where the few have all the capital or we're able to escape that fate by lowering the capital needed to gain those efficiencies (cloud computing, 3d printing)...

highly recommended story on the topic: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

my analogy was not about people deserving the output of the factory due to having worked there. it was just an attempt to reduce the problem to a single system to illustrate how earning potential tends to leak out, and why that would actually be a good thing if only "earning" and "being provided for" were decoupled. the very fact that you can use the word "entitled" illustrates the basic problem in the current system, where it is physically possible for a small fraction of the population to produce enough for everyone to consume, but where that is being blocked by the notion that there is something immoral about getting stuff you haven't "earned".