You can add Robert Shiller to the list of names who want to tax robots.
In recent years, there has been a growing initiative among politicians, economists, the academic community and the affluent to implement a policy to tax robots. Why? Because there are fears that robots will take away jobs from human beings, creating a dystopian nightmare where robots are our masters.
Writing in his blog, the Nobel laureate economist opined that the marketplace has indeed developed a wide array of services that have made our lives better and easier. At the same time, Shiller opines, these services are taking jobs away from human beings. He made a list of some of these technologies:
– Amazon Echo Dot (Alexa): replaces household help
– Delphi: replaces taxi drivers
– Doordash: replaces restaurant delivery people
“If these and other labor-displacing innovations succeed, surely calls to tax them will grow more frequent, owing to the human problems that arise when people lose their jobs – often jobs with which they closely identify, and for which they may have spent years preparing,” he wrote last week.
“Optimists point out that there have always been new jobs for people replaced by technology; but, as the robot revolution accelerates, doubts about how well this will work out continue to grow.”
Shiller further wrote that a tax robots could at least achieve two things: slowing down the accelerated process of automation and finance a program for displaced workers, which would be a Keynesian’s dream.
“A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality,” Shiller averred.
“Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career. This would accord with our natural sense of justice, and thus be likely to endure.”
This comes as Bill Gates recently called for robots to fork over payroll taxes if they have been discovered to replace a human worker. Here are his remarks from earlier this month:
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level,” he stated.
“Exactly how you’d do it, measure it, you know, it’s interesting for people to start talking about now. Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s OK.”
It is a silly proposal because a robot is just another form of capital that is meant for a company to be more efficient and improve productivity levels. Indeed, you wouldn’t retroactively tax a Windows operating system (OS) or Microsoft Office, would you?
As it was noted soon after Gates’ comments, not only do robots increase tax revenue, they also make whole populations better off. For centuries, this kind of progression has been going on for thousands of years: from the candle to the light bulb, from the wheel to the automobile, robots have replaced the human element and have allowed the human to offer their human capital in other industries that demand workers, or to seek out their passions and desires.
Why not implement a robot tax on banks for installing ATMs and getting rid of tellers? Why not impose a robot tax on auto manufacturers for producing vehicles and not letting human beings carry goods from one part of the country to the next? Why not start a tax on elevators to save the jobs of elevator operators? Why not start a robot tax for the sun because it is killing jobs for candlemakers?
Every aspect of our life has been dramatically enhanced because of technology, even if the meme below (courtesy of Tom Woods) doesn’t think so.
Moreover, the ultimate goal of any society is wealth and not jobs since employment is a cost of production and consumption rather than a benefit (SEE: Paging Milton Friedman – Pope Francis warns of ‘very grave sin’ if you fire workers).
We have heard all of the warnings before. The employees of the horse-and-buggy industry will be displaced. The icebox will destroy the iceman. The desktop computer will make workers obsolete.
As the old joke says, the future of the factory will have two employees: a dog and a human. The human will feed the dog…and the dog will ensure the human doesn’t touch anything.
By Kal Hendry via Flickr.
–AM
This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Maybe the tax base would be better off, if we taxed the Gates foundation and all other foundations 38% no matter what it does with its money. Any robot tax would just be passed on to the buyer of the products or services the robots are providing.
Cars today need less maintenance because of technological improvements in the engines and computers than run every subsystem in the car, so we need less mechanics to service them. Lost mechanics jobs = it is time to come up with a product improvement tax, any improvements to any product that might result in job losses tax.
That’s as stupid as the robot tax.
There used to be thousands of TV repair shops in the USA, but TV parts, if you can get them and labor costs so much today, you are better off just buying a new TV. So, we could come up with a my job is no longer needed because it cost too much tax. That’s as stupid as the robot tax.
Why is it these know it all geniuses always want to impose taxes on others that they will almost never have to pay themselves.