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The trends are clear. Offshoring, the death of unions, automation. There is no sign of a great revolution on the horizon to create new jobs to replace all those that these forces are destroying. And no, not everyone can sell stuff on Ebay and Etsy for a living or get rich off inventing a smartphone app.
The Luddite fallacy was still fallacious probably up to as late as 1999. But now it's a reality. A few self-checkout machines in a store replace several clerks, and don't create a single full job. Coder and robot engineer jobs will not equal the number of jobs they make obsolete.
I'm in favor of automation of course. It produces abundance, makes things cheaper, and it's very efficient. Yet we can't be in denial of the fact it reduces the pool of available work and the value of labor. Even a lot of intelligent jobs can be outsourced or automated now, it's not just the grunt work anymore.
If labor isn't organized, or there isn't a social safety net, both things libertarians and conservatives seem to want, how are people who are not computer programmers or doctors going to survive? Not everyone can be a janitor, waiter, massage therapist or plumber and there are only so many barista jobs. Are these people just going to be totally disenfranchised, and essentially the private property of the wealthy? If there isn't a system of universal basic income and unionization of the workforce is discouraged or outlawed, these people are either going to have to sell themselves into servitude or grovel and beg to appeal to the "charity" of churches and the rich and powerful.
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Even Janitors, waiters, and baristas can be replaced, at least in part by automation. There are, however, many other jobs that require thought, negotiation, and creativity that is not likely to be automated. Managers and supervisors of people that are still working, commercial and residential real estate, sales of vehicles, insurance and services, nursing, truck driving, automobile, HVAC and electrical technicians, to name a few. The libertarian view is to leave the government out of people's lives, so while not a card-carrying member, I would expect them to oppose any "safety-net" that is paid for by taxes, but also they would promote far less government regulation of business, which could lead a lower cost of labor, thus more people being hired and less need for automation to pay for things like an increased minimum wage and forced medical benefits.
Here's how it worked in Apatheid South Africa, and to a certain extent in segregated America. When there is not enough work for everyone, the marginalized ethnic population gets paid a little to do the work, and the elite get paid more to supervise them.
Yesterday I saw a red-haired white boy pushing a mower on the lawn of a business, and I was taken aback, how rare it is even now in America, to see a white person doing menial labor. Apartheid and Segregation are now, officially, gone, but now and still into the future, no matter how little work there is, the privileged demographic will be the beneficiaries of more of the income, and the workers less. The distribution of the fruits of labor, in a paradigm that is hidden from view, is basically a means to keep people in their places, not to reward the work. As the oligarchy grows, there is diminishing prospect that that will ever be reversed.
The trends are clear. Offshoring, the death of unions, automation. There is no sign of a great revolution on the horizon to create new jobs to replace all those that these forces are destroying. And no, not everyone can sell stuff on Ebay and Etsy for a living or get rich off inventing a smartphone app.
Why you have a lot of outsourcing is the printing of a lot of money by foreign central banks. As far as I am concerned this is economic warfare plain and simple. What we need to do and we need to do it ourselves as our government and our central bank aren't doing anything about it, is we need to set about raising wages in foreign countries. We need to be turning their printed money into wage inflation in their countries. We need to be reducing the value of the debt they bought in this country to finance their trade deficit by wage inflation here.
How to go about doing this. We need to organizes into unions. Collect high dews and take those dews and spend them on labor in those countries that are aggressively printing money and buying debt here. Make work project that way over pay their workers will work, but the closer we get to making money at this the more we can push the wages of their workers by putting more of them to work.
Wages are an expense according to businesses, but wages are also an investment in future consumption. The world's economy is going to be in for hard economic times until the printed money is turned into higher wages.
The minimum wage law in the US can drive wage price inflation.
I'm not a liberal I'm a realist, or at least I try to be.
Inflation brings with it the demand for full employment. What we have now is stagflation not true inflation. We have too much debt for wage price inflation currently.
Without safety nets (negative income taxes, universal basic income, etc.) there will likely be a gap between people needed for skilled and people not having the skills for labor. Unless people have money, the skills aren't going to just appear in people. There needs to be a safety net or there would be people out on the street. I would only be for lower minimum wage IFF companies have to chain prices to that. If minimum wage decreases monetarily wise but prices don't come down, that would be catastrophic.
Without safety nets (negative income taxes, universal basic income, etc.) there will likely be a gap between people needed for skilled and people not having the skills for labor. Unless people have money, the skills aren't going to just appear in people. There needs to be a safety net or there would be people out on the street. I would only be for lower minimum wage IFF companies have to chain prices to that. If minimum wage decreases monetarily wise but prices don't come down, that would be catastrophic.
Upping the minimum wage can do a lot. Part of what it can do is to reduce the dead weight lose of the total debt in the US. We are at the end of a 3 decade long debt bubble. The down side of this bubble could be something that looks like the great depression or it could look very different but we are in for a lot of economic pain for a very long time and the way to have that pain that is easiest on the bottom end is with wage price inflation driven by the minimum wage law.
Here's how it worked in Apatheid South Africa, and to a certain extent in segregated America. When there is not enough work for everyone, the marginalized ethnic population gets paid a little to do the work, and the elite get paid more to supervise them.
Yesterday I saw a red-haired white boy pushing a mower on the lawn of a business, and I was taken aback, how rare it is even now in America, to see a white person doing menial labor. Apartheid and Segregation are now, officially, gone, but now and still into the future, no matter how little work there is, the privileged demographic will be the beneficiaries of more of the income, and the workers less. The distribution of the fruits of labor, in a paradigm that is hidden from view, is basically a means to keep people in their places, not to reward the work. As the oligarchy grows, there is diminishing prospect that that will ever be reversed.
That is a really interesting point. It's not one I accept easily, but you may be on to something.
Just look to the gilded age how many Libertarians wish the world to be.
- Too old to work, if you don't have a family member to care for you...you starve exposed to the elements.
- Too disabled to work, if you don't have a family member to care for you...you starve exposed to the elements.
- No child labor laws.
- No overtime protections.
- No OSHA protections for accidents and chemicals
- No labor protections for being underpaid (or paid at all).
- No sexual harrassment, or physicial violence, regulations
- No requirement for vacation days, sick days, insurance, retirement benefits
In reality if they got what they wanted they would be in the same job position, but the wage supports, social security, and regulations helping them would be gone and would be worse off. To be honest, we are all likely to suffer from decreased regulations on food, water, medical services...
Libertarianism is full of slogans and bold ideals, but as you dig into the grit of how many wish it to work one realizes it is full of psychotics and crippled mental processes by socially retarded people. Where more than a handful of people agreeing to a platform, outside of it not being a mainstream platform, would be astonishing. Penn and Teller are about the most sane people who consider themselves libertarians. While they are often cast as not true libertarians as they debunk cranks (like Ron Paul's Health Freedom initiatives).
The trends are clear. Offshoring, the death of unions, automation.
There is no sign of a great revolution on the horizon to create new jobs
to replace all those that these forces are destroying.
The common denominator in all these threads is the imbalance between the raw number of
warm bodies (skilled or not) and the raw number of jobs that offer any degree of self sufficiency.
Quote:
If labor isn't organized, or there isn't a social safety net ...
how are people who are not computer programmers or doctors going to survive?
Short term or Long term?
Long term it's about moderating birth rates to align the raw number of warm bodies
to be somewhere close (or ideally just a wee bit less) than what is actually needed.
Short term... it's about finding **something else** for those MILLION's of surplus warm bodies
to do all day that will justify the rest of us to fund the social safety net costs they will continue to
absorb until the day they die. Ideally something productive but that is almost secondary.
And by this... to increase the supply:demand market value of the rest of the workers.
Maybe even increased enough that they'll earn enough to pay some taxes too.
The OP titles the thread "What is the libertarian/neoliberal solution for people who will be shut out of work?"
The notion of a solution implies there is a problem that needs to be solved. I don't see one.
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