Here's some food for thought...
Industrial robots are already available for about $20,000 each that can work 24x7 for about 3-4 years before needing replacement. They're essentially disposable, and are perfectly capable of taking over millions of lower-level jobs. Think about the effect on society if, say, half of the 4 million fast food workers were fired. Or half of the 4 million retail workers.
These people aren't welfare moms, these are breadwinners. Taxpayers. Americans like you and me.
And that's not an ideological statement, it's just a fact.
Enormous advances in computer understanding and artificial intelligence are raising the specter of job loss that will easily outpace the 8.8 million jobs lost during the Great Recession.
These jobs will never return. Ever.
What about retraining?
It can't help. Increasingly complex jobs will become automated. For example, all the key technology to replace a big chunk of the 1.7 million long-haul truck drivers exists today (in Google's self-driving cars). And that's only one small example of the kind of work most of us assume will always be reserved exclusively for people.
But productivity always creates new jobs!
In the past, productivity gains famously led to new, previously unimagined jobs, but this won't continue indefinitely. As computers continue to get smarter they will be able to take over more and more of the jobs that people previously had to do. Not all, of course (unless you believe that Skynet is coming) but the situation will not improve over time.
And the productivity gains will be realized only by business owners and an ever-smaller circle of employees.
A lot of people will be fired. Friends. Neighbors. Family.
And no matter what you may believe, I don't think you want 5 or 10 million additional unemployed and hopeless parents wandering around the country, desperate to feed their children.
I know I don't.
In their position I'd stop at nothing, and I know every single parent among you would do the same.
Self-defense? It doesn't matter how you feel about guns: who can afford enough armament to defend their own family indefinitely if it comes to that? How likely is that to happen? I don't know, but consider what might have happened during the Depression if firearms were as readily available as they are today.
So we're going to have to figure out, as a society, what we want to do about that degree of unemployment. We'll need to decide how these people can afford to buy the things that keep the economy moving even though they may be permanently unemployed.
The answers won't come by clinging to our ideologies (of "liberal" or "conservative" or "libertarian" or "Tea Party"). Or by calling each other names (such as "liberal" or "conservative" or "libertarian" or "Tea Party"). Or by waiting for today's politicians to address it.
So let's just stipulate that all rich people are greedy, and everyone on welfare is a cheat, so we can have a serious discussion about a serious problem.
Because the harder it becomes to find people to buy or rent the properties we invest in, the lower asset prices will become. Anyone but the hugest investors will suffer along with the unemployed.
And personally, I'm not about to lose my business to someone simply because they're rich—greedy or not ;-)
