This fixation on creating more work is what Bastiat, in the 19th century, called “Sisyphism” (after the lucky man in Hell who was fully employed rolling a giant rock up a hill for all eternity). We see the same ideological assumptions...displayed in arguments that strong “intellectual property” law is necessary for creating “jobs” and guaranteeing income for creators.
The idea is that we either impose artificial inefficiencies on technologies of abundance in order to increase the amount of labor (“jobs!”) required to produce a given standard of living, or we enclose those technologies to make their output artificially expensive so that everyone has to work longer hours to pay for them, so the increased price can go to paying wages for all those people running on conveyor belts and rat wheels. Make sense?
Read the full article at Center for a Stateless Society
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