FAKING IT
Thanks to the election of President Trump and his uncompromising attitude to the establishment media, much hot air is being expended on the subject of ‘fake news’. Those being so exercised seem unable to stop and wonder when such news has NOT been, shall we say, ‘nuanced’. In Napoleon’s day, a well-worn figure of speech was ‘to lie like a bulletin’ while there was always much rather at hollow hilarity in the West over the fact that one of the Soviet Union’s main organs of the press was call ‘Pravda’ or, in English, ‘The Truth’.
What we should, of course, be getting worked up about is ‘fake economics’, for this is a much more pervasive evil, as well as a much more persistent one.
One such idea, currently doing the rounds is that automation is about to throw everyone out of work and so we should tax the ‘robots’ and distribute the proceeds as a ‘universal income’ to the poor souls who can no longer find work in industrial drudgery.
Ironically, Bill Gates is the latest to add his voice to this half-reasoned, Broken Window call – a man whose entrepreneurial genius has spared us non-specialists more labour and meanwhile reduced the employment opportunities of more accountants, typists, publishers, graphic designers, and photographers than anyone in history!
Would you mind just writing us all a cheque now, Bill, for all that lost income and we’ll call it square?
What none of those raising such a clamour seem to realize is that the ‘robots’ – and how conveniently sinister THAT term seems, with its echoes of every piece of dystopian science fiction from Frankenstein to Terminator and beyond – will only be installed if they allow more or better goods to be made at lower cost and that for their installers to enjoy a return, those goods have to be able to be sold at a price the masses – including the robotically-displaced masses – can afford to pay!
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