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Bill Gates: The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes (qz.com)
In a recent interview with Quartz, Bill Gates said he believes that governments should tax companies that use robots who are taking human jobs, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. The money gained from taxing robots could then be used to finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools -- jobs which humans are particularly well suited for. Quartz reports: [Gates] argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it. "You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed" of automation, Gates argues. That's because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it's important to be able to manage that displacement. "You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once," Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them. You can watch Gates' remarks in a video here, or read the transcript embedded in Quartz' report.
Generous with compensation != generous with hiring
It's true, the average American worker doesn't get as much vacation time as a European worker. Still, half of American workers don't use all of their vacation days as it is. But pay is higher. Perhaps American workers just value cash compensation over other benefits.
On the hiring front (which is the topic IIRC), hiring climate is substantially better in the US. Hiring/firing is easier, and labor mobility is higher. The unemployment rate is more volatile, but also historically lower.
History has told a story of increasingly decentralized governments, only to have them replaced by increasingly centralized corporate empires.
When, in fact, history tells a story of increasingly centralized governments promoting (and being promoted by) increasingly centralized business empires. This process continues until some disruptive force comes along with which the centralized authority is unable to cope. In all cases power becomes ever more centralized until such a time as the information necessary to maintain that centralized power exceeds the ability of the organization centralizing power to process it. There are three things areas in which an organization may centralize beyond its ability to process information:
When the organization is unable to communicate information well enough and fast enough to and from the central decision makers, central authority collapses
When the data necessary to make adequate decisions exceeds the ability of the central authority to gather and store it, the central authority collapses.
When the amount of data necessary to make adequate decisions exceed the ability of the central authority to process it, the central authority collapses.
Technology has eliminated the problem of speed of communication as a limiting factor on centralized control. I have my doubts about the possibility of overcoming the other communication limits (once the number of people in an organization exceeds some number it appears that words begin to mean different things to different, not clearly defined, groups of people, even when they, theoretically, share the same language). Technology has, at least theoretically, overcome the limit on the ability to gather and store the data necessary to make adequate decisions over the world. However, while technology has massively increased human ability to process the data necessary to manage large centralized organizations, there appear to be emergent qualities to ever larger organizations which cause them to suddenly, and without warning, have different requirements for what data needs to be processed.
Basically, my point is that power tends to become more and more centralized until the organization centralizing the power is no longer manageable. Usually, the people in charge continue to attempt to consolidate ever more power while this is happening until something catastrophic occurs. Occasionally, a visionary has arisen who manages to decentralize authority sufficiently to allow the organization to continue to thrive (or to divide into multiple subgroups which thrive) for some time after the initial singularity.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
A nit but corporations are groups of people with all the rights and responsibilities of those individuals. We only treat them as "a person" as legal shorthand.
Not quite. The whole point of a incorporated / limited liability company and equivalent entities (Inc, llc, Ltd, SA, GmbH, NV, etc) is that owners are only liable up to their investment, i.e. you are not responsible for the debts of the corporation; not individually and not as a group. You can lose your investment, but that's the limit of your liability. If the group of owners of e.g. a coal plant would have the "rights and responsibilities" of the entity, they would be collectively responsible for its debts, e.g. cleanup costst, if it goes bankrupt. As a corporation, the plant goes bankrupt, the owners lose their investments (their shares are worthless), but remaining debts and liabilities cannot be collected.
Because this creates moral hazard and can cause society to be left with unpaid liabilities (tax, legal liabilities such as cleanup costs) historically they could only be created by special government fiat ("royal charter"), an implicit collective acceptance that the benefits outweigh the risk to society, and their number was quite limited for a long time, with famous corporations like the Dutch and British East India Companies among the earliest examples. Now, however, anybody and their uncle can start a llc/corporation, and while in theory the managers can be held responsible if they act in bad faith (e.g. take out loans, funnel the money to Caymans, declare bankruptcy) this is not prosecuted nearly often enough.
Economists tend to think the most efficient and least distorting thing to do is toss all existing taxes and replace them all with a single, broad-based consumption tax.
I won't support that because it's broadly regressive: poor people pay a higher percentage of their income as tax. You can kind of balance it out, but when that happens (like in California), the middle class pays the highest percentage.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."