Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

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And, of course you need a way to prevent employers from using various alternatives available to them.

* You need very high import taxes, so goods have to be produced with local labour

* If truly automation were to become pervasive, that needs taxing

* You probably need restrictions to prevent money from crossing borders too easily

* You can't have open borders

(or)

* You have to strongly respond to illegals working (or legalize them, while still killing those illegal jobs), because they'll destroy the bargaining power of others

(this is, incidentally, why for 90% of history leftists and communists were strongly against immigration, and the right was pro-immigration. Even today, the right is still in favor of (limited) immigration, that doesn't seem to have changed much. But I sometimes wonder if it isn't the case that Trump won because a significant portion of the left electorate voted for him because of the labour competition due to immigration and tolerating of illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants' labour)

Alternatively, we could ditch the neo-feudalism, embrace automation, and give people a more meaningful live than having to slave 60 hour weeks to be allowed to survive, at meaningless jobs that could easily be done by machines.

But the neo-feudalism makes like 100 people happy, so, checkmate, you communist!!

(On a more serious note, I fully expect automation to simply lead to automated armies defending the rich from the poor, rather than relieving any suffering anywhere. Productivity increases have not lead to (proportional) wage increases, have not lead to (proportional) reductions in working hours. The internet has not lead to information-driven utopia, but instead ad-serving dystopia. Automation will also fall to the deathly grip of capitalism, as does everything else.)

> leftists and communists were strongly against immigration

This is revisionism and ignores the whole "internationalism" vs "socialism in one country" debate. It also fails to recognise the history of nativist (far-)right anti-immigration parties and lefty anti-borders activists.

Internationalism on the left was going to force the world to become leftist by having a border between leftist and other governments. THAT border was going to have huge import taxes.

So no, I think not revisionist at all.

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