I saw Tucker Carlson and Bill de Blasio talking on Tucker’s show the other night.  One thing that Tucker did agree with de Blasio on was the threat of automation to low skilled workers.

This is one of those topics where Tucker’s Right-leaning populism takes a turn for the dumb.  I was going to ignore this until Bill de Blasio decided to publish this piece in Wired.

Why American Workers Need to Be Protected From Automation
Opinion: As President, I would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans, and create a federal agency to oversee automation.

Fantastic, another thing some dipshit from New York City wants to regulate even though he has no understanding of it whatsoever.

The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating. Already, according to the Brookings Institution, 36 million American jobs are “highly likely” to be automated out of existence in the coming decades.

But automation and human employment should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. America has welcomed technological advancement throughout our history, and we still should, as long as the benefits of these advancements are shared evenly instead of solely going to big corporations.

Immediately, he takes a Communist approach to this topic, seeing it as workers vs. corporations – and by extension, their management.  From this analysis, you know that whatever he comes up with next is going to be bad.

As mayor of New York, and as a candidate for President focused on the needs of working people, I’ve seen at home and across the country that workers can benefit from these technological changes, but we can’t let American jobs be replaced by them. That’s why I’m proposing a new plan today to protect American workers and ensure that we all share in the gains from technological advancement.

So is he proposing halting the development of new technology?

To start, my plan calls for a new federal agency, the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency (FAWPA), to oversee automation and safeguard jobs and communities.

FAWPA would create a permitting process for any company seeking to increase automation that would displace workers. Approval of those plans would be conditioned on protecting workers; if their jobs are eliminated through automation, the company would be required to offer their workers new jobs with equal pay, or a severance package in line with their tenure at the company.

Yes, that is exactly what he is going to do.  Companies will have to get permission to upgrade their technology and pay out the nose for the right to do that.

Lastly, my proposal would institute a “robot tax” on large companies that eliminate jobs through increased automation and fail to provide adequate replacement jobs. They’d be required to pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated. That revenue would go right into a new generation of labor-intensive, high-employment infrastructure projects and new jobs in areas such as health care and green energy that would provide new employment. Displaced workers would be guaranteed new jobs created in these fields at comparable salaries.

What he is talking about is increasing the costs of doing business.  That makes America less competitive on the global market.  Which in turn will harm American businesses.

To try and save some jobs from being lost to robots, he is going to cost America many more jobs when companies can’t be cost-competitive and go under.

This tax, and the jobs in 21st century fields that it creates, would drastically change what the next economy will look like for working people. It’ll have two fundamental effects that would guarantee that American workers have a shield against unemployment.

I’m sorry if I sound cruel, but why should low skilled workers who can easily be automated out of a job have their jobs artificially protected through burdensome regulation?

First, my plan would ensure stability for the workers who have the jobs of today. Secondly, by taking the revenues created by closing the automation loophole and the “robot tax” and investing them in new programs, it would facilitate the next generation of jobs—good-paying union jobs in green energy, early childhood education, home health care, and the like. For generations, Americans went to work confident not just that they had the security of a good-paying job with union benefits, but that they’d have that security for years to come. Those of them still in the workforce—as well as Generation X and Millennials—deserve that same peace of mind.

So he wants to tax companies to death for capital upgrades and use that money to subsidize inefficient busy work and pet projects.  Did he get that idea out of the Hugo Chavez book of economics?

To deal with this looming threat, some tech leaders in Silicon Valley, and my fellow 2020 candidate Andrew Yang, have proposed providing every American with a Universal Basic Income (UBI) of $12,000 a year. While this idea could be part of a broader solution, as a standalone proposal it’s woefully inadequate and has the potential to do more harm than good.

At best, UBI overlooks the intrinsic value of a job, believing the financial life support of a monthly check can substitute for meaningful employment.

This is the only thing he said that is actually right.  Yang’s UBI idea is just subsidized indolence.

At worst, it’s a sleight of hand trick, telling Americans that automation will create a better future for all while it instead locks middle-class families into unemployment and ensures the profits created by new technological advancement flow only to the wealthy.

New technological advancement flows money to everyone.  I will get to that later.

My plan wouldn’t accept a post-work future. Instead, it would hasten a work-filled future—one where we use technological advancement to bridge the gap between our current workforce at risk of being made redundant by automation and the resilient union workforce we need. A “robot tax” will help us create stable, good-paying middle-class jobs for generations to come.

Doing more inefficient subsidized busy work?  Those are not sustainable “good-paying middle-class jobs.”  Nor is trying to freeze us in time technologically.  The rest of the world will surpass us.

Last week I visited the Port of Los Angeles, the site of one of the newest battles over workplace automation. Thousands of members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union took to the streets this spring to protest a plan to replace their jobs with gigantic automated, remote-controlled container moving vehicles.

Their story shows the power that a united group of working people has—but it also shows the limits of how far even they can go without the help of their government. The company and port officials have ignored their pleas so far, and hundreds of jobs may now be lost. Workers like the longshoremen, and the American communities that depend on them, need the government to be on their side if they’re going to survive the onslaught of automation. That means creating an automation policy that puts workers, not corporations, first.

This just proves that there is nothing new under the sun.

This is little more than good ol’ Luddism, except that he wants to use taxation instead of hammers to destroy the equipment that will replace people.

A century ago, Bill de Blasio would have taxed trucks to protect the wagon drivers and farriers who would lose their jobs when the draft horse was phased out.

Of course, the loss of the draft horse didn’t leave millions out of work.  Society shifted and we needed mechanics and people to produce gas and tires, and a whole new sector of the economy sprang up.  The problem is that guys like de Blasio are too dumb to see that.

We don’t even need to go back 100 years to think about this, or why his idea is a dangerous slippery slope.

My dad used to tell me stories about when he was a young law student that one of the jobs law school students could get was copying legal documents for court.  Literally sitting at a typewriter and a few carbon sheets and retyping documents for the court.  Within a few years of his first job, those jobs disappeared overnight to the photocopier.

Not long after that, the couriers who had the job of taking papers back and forth from law offices to court were replaced by the fax machine.  Now e-mail largely does that job.

The advent of the PC eliminated armies worth of people.  Actuaries were replaced by accounting software.  Personal assistants and secretaries there thinned out because one secretary with a computer was worth ten with typewriters, file cabinets, and Rolodex.

Back in the days of engineering, an engineer might lead a team of draftsmen to work on drawings with pencils on drafting tables.  Now that engineer can run SolidWorks or another CAD program and those draftsmen are no longer necessary.

So if de Blasio is going to tax the piss out of a company for replacing an assembly line worker with a robot, will he do the same for a company that upgrades to Quicken Books?

But just with all these other examples, the country isn’t filled with millions of secretaries and actuaries and draftsmen sitting under bridges with signs “Will collate for food.”

Yes, some people will fall on hard times for a period of time.  That will be tough.  I don’t want to discount that.  But the total amount of pain and suffering in the country would increase hugely if de Blasio stunts the entire US economy to help a few.

Remember that 36 million people who will lose their jobs to automation will be phased out slowly, not all dumped overnight.

The biggest beneficiaries of de Blasio’s plan will be countries like China, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore where they will have no compunction against automation and will blow past us in cost reduction and increased quality driving American companies out of business.

I work in a factory, we have robots.  One reason that we have robots, and de Blasio overlooks this, is that the robots do a better job.  We have a robot spin polisher.  That is a job that used to be done by hand.  Now the robot does it and every part that comes off is the same to within two-thousandths and are all visually identical.  We had issues where the visual appearance of the parts changed depending on which shift ran them because of the inconsistency of hand polishing.

So it’s not just about cost, it’s about quality, consistency, and safety.

For those of you who wonder about the title of this post and how it relates to the subject.  There is an apocryphal story about the great Milton Friedman.  I first heard it about a trip to China.

While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.

“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.

De Blasio seems to think that the job of companies is to employ people instead of make money.  He wants to force companies to make workers dig with spoons.  While he’s coming up with bigger and heavier sticks with which to motivate companies to employ people inefficiently, our competitors will eat our manufacturing lunch.

I don’t know if it is ignorance or intent, but every idea the Left seems to come up with will destroy the American economy.  Really it doesn’t matter though.  The Green New Deal plus a robot tax will turn the US into North Venezuela.