While you have plenty of leisure you are still better off because you can choose whether to work or not.
Let's just be honest. The "rich" entrepreneurs are the ones capable of arranging labor and capital goods in a way that results in products you demand. And they are rewarded for doing so with profit. If you remove their ability to do so, prices of consumer goods will skyrocket or run out and you will certainly have plenty of work to do, such as grow your own food. It is these people you are jealous of but you fail to realize you do not complain about the good products at low prices they produce. You for instance with the xbox have had hours and hours of entertainment from a piece of technology smaller than a toaster. The transaction is not zero sum, you both leave happy.
You'd rather we All be poor? No thanks. If you want to own a machine of your own, make one.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
I get that automation will make things cheaper, but this doesn't address what the people with no jobs are going to do.
The only thing I'm worried about is there not being enough jobs and people starving.
If robots can one day make everything for free, then we will all be happy and fat, and who cares. I don't get how cheaper things is a bad thing? The only time there is people starving is when governments prevent markets from working. Trust me, no businessman will employ a machine to do a process that does not produce income, that is, profit from consumer demand. Entrepreneurs can only profit when they bring things to market that consumers are willing to spend their money on, and that are cost effective. If consumers do "run out of money" the machines will be scrapped in favor of cheaper production methods, that allow for the most effective use of capital. Markets adjust in this way all the time. When consumers search for the lowest prices, the market delivers. We just have no way of knowing what new products and processes that will be created in the future and just how much better off we will be. To think that this point in time is the pinnacle of civilization is to make the same mistake of thousands that came before us, who did not have near the standard of living we take for granted. As long as people are free to live and work as they please, society benefits.