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Comment by lukewrites | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for this as soon as we change the laws so companies pay payroll taxes on automation commensurate to the number of paid positions taken by the equipment.

Automation is what we should be striving for, but only if workers and society see material benefits from it. ("Your labor potential can be reallocated to a position of higher need"/"You now have the opportunity to retrain" isn't a material benefit.)

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This would kill the entire economy almost immediately.

How many "paid positions" does Microsoft Excel replace every day? A single for loop could replace a thousand jobs doing manual computation.

How many farm laborers are replaced by a single piece of modern equipment?

You can't "strive for" automation, while at the same time essentially locking in labor costs by taxing that automation as human labor.

> How many "paid positions" does Microsoft Excel replace every day?

I don't know, could you tell me? I don't think that we actually can point to people working in the position of calculator who are rendered unemployed by Excel version bumps. Arguing that we'd be putting Bob Cratchet and other clerks from the 1800's out of work rings of reductio ad absurdum.

MS Excel seems to lack the one-to-one correlation between a worker on a fulfillment line putting things in boxes and a robot on the same line doing the same work (and doing it more efficiently, since the 'bot custom-fits the packaging to the product).

The farm and mining automation example do ring truer, and in each case we've seen large increases in productivity (as well as consolidation) while seeing people in these communities falling out of work and not being able to get back into the labor market. To pick the only mining county I can think off off the top of my head, the effect of automation continues to be felt in local economies:

https://www.bestplaces.net/economy/county/kentucky/harlan

https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/coal/article44121909.htm...

> You can't "strive for" automation, while at the same time essentially locking in labor costs by taxing that automation as human labor.

Why not?

Reductio ad absurdum is not a fallacy, it's a perfectly valid logical argument (that applies in this case).

Email, MS Office and cell phones have put almost all secretaries out of their jobs. Automated billing system (in a telco) has put my aunt out of her job.

Office jobs are disappearing by the millions, just like physical ones. Lucikly, at least until now, new ones were created in their place.

Tax on labour (or housing) is quite weird if you look at it with fresh eyes. Don't we want to support people working and living in a house? Then why tax those? Is it a relic from the past?

Thought experiment: what if we (only) tax pollution? All taxes end up being paid by the consumer anyway. But this get the incentive straight to deliver products/services "cleanly".

Just a thought...

"Taxing housing" isn't weird at all. We don't tax housing. If you rent, you pay rent to your landlord and that's it. You don't also pay taxes on that rent to the government. I'm guessing what you actually mean is that we tax property. This seems inherently fair to me. Why should you get to squat on a piece of land for free in perpetuity, especially when for most land, the value of the land is inherently improved by government-provided services?

Semi-related ... I feel like we should tax rent-seeking way more than we do. Selling a piece of property/house is one thing, but to extend your metaphor, why should one get to seek rent on a piece of property in perpetuity (if the tenant stays long term)?

Of course, I understand how valuable short-term living arrangements are for a number of reasons; my issue is with long term landlords, who can evict a tenant who's been there for decades at any whim ... and they reap the profits, while the tenant is out on the streets with nothing to gain from their many years of payments.

Most paces have some tax for living there, usually related to the worth of the house. Weather that's collected at the owner or at the rent-payer, that's not the point as "all taxes are transferred to the consumer" anyway.

That seems tough to determine. Does an autonomous bulldozer count as one employee because you would have had one person driving it? Or does it count as five employees because you run it 24/7? Or does it count as five hundred employees because that’s how many people you’d need if they were using shovels?

Similarly, this also leaves open a big loophole - if you implement a tax on jobs eliminated, the incentive shifts to starting companies that that don't have jobs in the first place. Then you quickly arrive at the sub-contracted functions shell game where a company pays for a service rather than for specific workers to avoid the automation tax, and the fulfillment companies shuffle around as new automation tech allows them to eliminate more jobs.

I don't think taxation on automated labor really gets us anywhere. Wealth tax makes a lot more sense with fewer loopholes.

Shovels? How many people would it take to do the job without shovels is the question you should be asking yourself.

I find this notion ridiculous. There are many industries like farming and mining which are now highly mechanised and employ a tiny fraction of what they did. As a result, food and minerals are cheap, fewer workers have to put their lives at risk doing dangerous jobs, and the labour force for other endeavours is increased.

Mechanisation delivers benefits to society at large, although I agree that at an individual level redundancy is harmful. This harm is a humanitarian issue, which the whole of society is responsible for, not an ill which employers should be specifically penalised for.

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