Fear and power go hand in hand. There are always new fears (real and imagined) that power seeks to capitalize on. A new one is the fear that robots "will take all of our jobs." Lots of government "solutions" are being tossed around, but hardly a mention of government being the problem. Ron Paul discusses on today's Myth-Busters!
Fear and power go hand in hand. There are always new fears (real and imagined) that power seeks to capitalize on. A new one is the fear that robots "will take all of our jobs." Lots of government "solutions" are being tossed around, but hardly a mention of government being the problem. Ron Paul discusses on today's Myth-Busters!
Government Intervention and Job Flexibility00:15:07
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
This is the day we do MythBusters with co-host Chris Rossini.
Chris, welcome to our program today.
Morning, Dr. Paul.
Great to be with you again.
Well very good.
What do we have in store for our viewers today?
What would we like to talk about here?
Yes, well as we all know fear and power go hand in hand.
There's always some new fear out there, real and imagined, and always government so-called solutions to them.
So today we're going to talk about the fear of robots and specifically the fear that they're going to take all of our jobs.
Now that makes a good headline, Dr. Paul, but is that, economically speaking, even possible for robots to take every single job?
Hardly.
Matter of fact, most of the time technology, when it's improving and people fear that their job is going to be lost, it builds and creates more jobs in different areas, of course, and you might have to be trained for it.
But, you know, when I think of robots taking jobs, I think of that in a general term of technology, that's a whole excuse that technology takes jobs.
But if one just stops and thinks for a minute, technology increases the standard of living.
Think about farming.
You get a tractor, and yeah, you might put 100 people out of work, but all of a sudden productivity goes way up.
Somebody has to make the tractor.
Somebody has to repair the tractors and productivity is up.
Somebody has to distribute the goods.
So there's always another job that people could move around.
The biggest problem is making sure that it's flexible.
You know, whether it's monetary policy or economic policy, for it to work, it has to be flexible.
It has to be give and take.
The market has to send signals.
Supply and demand has to be important.
All these things work unless the government gets involved.
And if they decide that, oh, something is going to happen if we have robots, then we're going to lose a lot of jobs.
There may be a shifting of jobs, but people don't really lose the jobs.
I mean, jobs don't disappear many times, and for the most part, they increase.
Not only do they increase, there's a lot more efficiency.
So when jobs, when technology came along, the miners were working 12 hours a day.
Then they had better technology.
They still had to work hard, but they might be able to reduce their hours to 10 or 8 or 6 or create and produce as much work as they did before the automation.
And now, though, they're talking about robots more now because government has gotten too much involved in the economy and in labor.
And that should be expected when government gets involved, they're going to disrupt this smooth transition.
But no, they should not fear robots.
You know, per se, there are times when robots might be a violation by government, and sometimes robots might be a violation of private individuals on others.
But for the most part, you know, they can be very, very beneficial.
And we have to have an economy and a flexibility and a free market system where people understand that you have to make adjustments.
And if they do this through the market, it's usually smoother and people have time to adjust.
It's not like you turn on a switch and all of a sudden 100,000 people or 100 people from business has to shift over and find something.
Most of the time, there's a transition period, but refusing to accept the transition and having people demagogue it and say, well, this is a conspiracy against the workers and this sort of thing, then that becomes more difficult.
So, no, robots are a good idea, and we shouldn't do anything to impede them.
There should be restrictions on them, just like every restriction in the free market.
You can't violate another person's property or rights, and that is overuse and destruction of other people's property or spying on people.
So, there would be limits, but for the most part, we should be very pleased with technology.
Robots can serve as a method whereby our standard of living goes up.
And I don't think people should ever have to worry there's going to be a net decrease in jobs.
That doesn't happen with technology.
When the government allows it to operate, most of the time with new technology, standard living goes up, people don't have to work quite as hard, and new jobs are created.
And we have to be willing to listen to the market, and we have to be flexible.
The businessman has to be very, very flexible and moving with conditions, or they go out of business.
Labor has to be flexible too in order to accommodate.
And the whole accommodation is designed to protect the consumer.
And if people care about the consumer, they have to think about how things like robots and transitions work out much better when it's voluntary rather than through compulsion and regulation by government officials.
And we have to make an effort to sort out the demagoguing by the politicians who try to distort and create fears in order to have their way in certain policymaking.
Yes, and as a lot of people, they instinctively rush to government to try to solve this problem.
They don't really understand the government, if it is a problem, actually helps to create it.
In a free society, robots would be created according to supply and demand, like everything else.
But in our society, we have a never-ending stream of regulations.
And if you could talk about that and how the minimum wage actually helps increase the demand for robots.
Well, it's government expense, whether it's taxes, regulations, or pressure to pay somebody more money than they have actually produced products to justify the pay.
So that makes it tighter.
Some businesses work on a very tight margin.
They don't have a tremendous margin to work with.
And when the government comes in and does this, then it becomes very difficult to keep the business going.
So then they try to compensate because there's still enough marketplace left out there.
And we've seen this recently with people pushing the minimum wage up very high, $15 in some places.
They start looking around.
Well, maybe we can have a machine replace this job.
This is not a natural thing that may have come in a free market, but once the conditions are so bad created by government, it might come in a different manner.
It comes through under duress, under force, and they have to try to adjust to save their business.
That's quite a bit different than the same event happening over a period of time and people having a chance to adjust.
And that's why if you look to the problems that so much of the businesses face in labor, it's usually caused by government.
If it weren't by cause by the government, the transition would be so much smoother.
And unfortunately, we have too much government the way we're going now, especially with the Great Recession not having completed itself and a lot of underemployment.
This means that these conditions have to change, and the more they allow the market to handle these things, the better.
And of course, the real solution to that is getting the government out of the hair of private voluntary economic transactions.
We recognize that voluntary transaction between individuals in social events, sexual events, religious issues, and spiritual issues.
It's all voluntary.
But economics, there always has to be some mischief maker out there that has to tell people what to do with their time and their money.
And that's why they create these conditions.
And then there's this natural consequence of business people trying to make up for the additional costs that are placed on them due to the government regulations.
Next, let's look at this from a laborer's point of view.
Now, as much as we would like it to be so, jobs are never permanent or hardly ever permanent.
Ours is a world of change, and we constantly have to adjust to change.
Wouldn't it be ideal or much better, Dr. Paul, that if you lose your job to a robot to have a free market flexibility to quickly be able to get a new job, or in our case today, with tons of restrictions and regulations and licensing, that actually impedes getting a job?
Yeah, that's absolutely right, because the market is a double-edged swords in some way on this because they can adjust, but they can adjust for bad regulations that's hurting the businessman, and they come along and they compensate.
So that allows the government system to last a little bit longer.
But when the government gets involved and they produce these conditions where robots are used probably artificially, maybe too soon, and unnecessarily, if you don't have anything left of the free market, it's going to cause havoc.
So the government interference can be compensated by the free market and they can take care of that.
And this to me is so important because the government, the government, all they do is they get involved in this, interfere with it.
And I think the government, if they would just stay out of it, it would be so much better.
The wages are still important, whether it's a minimum wage or not.
But Mises, the great Austrian economist, said there should be never any unemployment.
And this is the hard part for people to adjust.
They're tolerant on some of the social things, but not on economic.
But his argument was there's always a job for everybody that wants to and can work.
The only objection is what are they going to get paid?
So if they're producing only $3 worth of labor and production, you know, they can't make $10.
Then the government comes in and regulates.
So they're the cause of the problem.
But the freer the market, the easier it is to adjust to economic and technological changes.
But when the government creates the problem and then the governments interfere of new jobs coming by and they just make it much worse.
So it's back to the old theme that government is the culprit.
If they've done something wrong, how do we expect them to write another regulation to rectify the conditions they created?
It's magnificent.
Adam Smith considered this to be the invisible hand.
The things just adjust and they work out.
But when you have the bureaucrats and central economic planning, it never works out.
It just compounds the problem, costs more money, and eventually the standard of living goes down.
So that's what we're witnessing.
Instead of saying, oh, robots, this is wonderful.
The standard of living is going to go up.
We see this now because there's these labor fights that go on, and it's used to build up fear and demand that the government spend more money and guarantee minimum wages for everybody, the living wage, and this will solve all the problem.
Now, we should look to this as a tremendous benefit because the technology and robots and all, if there's no use of force and violence, they are a real blessing in raising the standard of living for the average person.
And this whole idea that there wouldn't be as many jobs, think about how many jobs were taken away from the blacksmiths when we had automobiles come in.
People expressed that, well, what are they going to do?
There will be no jobs for them.
And just think how many jobs have been created by building automobiles and doing providing fuel and repairs and all these things.
So it was a tremendous boost to employment to have technology like the automobile come in.
So people shouldn't fear technology.
They should not fear the robots.
And the more we understand that, the easier it would be.
But there will be the demagogues who will say, oh, no, you mean somebody might have to take a job for four or five dollars an hour when he knows he can get 15 if they just get the politicians on their side.
And that goes back to that circle again.
How's the businessman going to survive?
But it's a wonderful thing that this technology is available and has worked over the centuries.
That's how the standard of living has gone up.
And I've talked about this is that since the Industrial Revolution, just think of the tremendous progress there's been.
And it hasn't been because of government coercion.
It's because there was a recognition that there should be more freedom and more trade throughout the world.
And that's when the standard of living started to go up.
And there was a recognition that there was a principle of liberty and it should be applied to economic events, which is being undermined today.
And it's a real threat.
And that's, of course, one of the things I think that we're threatened by the most is the fact that they're undermining this principle of individual liberty in the marketplace.
And then the standard of living goes down.
And then you mix that in with monetary policy.
And all of a sudden, we see the standard of living going down for a lot of people in the middle class category.
And that is the reason that sometimes you have to be skeptical of some of these statistics when they come out and say, well, you know, we're practically at full employment, only four people unemployed, but they don't count a lot of people.
The labor participation rate keeps going down.
There's less people out there.
So they fudge the figures.
And that's why there's so much resentment.
And they try to solve this by government demagoguing it and playing on it and say, we'll take care of it.
We will demand a wage for you regardless.
And we'll demand free education and free health care and the whole works until the bankruptcy occurs and the bankruptcy is at our doorstep because they haven't quite understood how the market works.
Drones And Nuclear Power00:06:25
Let's finish the show on what the real fear of robots is and should be.
And we use drones as an example.
Now, drones could be used for great good, as like with Amazon and delivering packages and satisfying human wants, but they could also be used for evil things, like for government to use them to sanitize their war making.
At least there's no boots on the ground, but they're still doing a lot of killing.
So isn't there real fear, Dr. Paul, what the government, the potential that it has to use robots for evil things?
Yeah, and because they're very sophisticated and they'll be likely to use them because it's sort of sterilizing the whole situation.
But that's the way it's generally been.
Technology is too often used to enhance the weaponry that we've used, a jet airplane.
Think how wonderful a jet airplane is in travel, yet the jet airplanes have been used to do a lot of harm for the bombing.
Drones would be the same thing, but there's something more sneaky about the drone because somebody in Arizona can direct drones into killing people halfway around the world.
And that is a temptation that's pretty hard to resist, especially if they accept the philosophy that we, as the manager of an empire, we have this obligation to sort all the problems out in the world and do good.
So yes, the temptation is too great.
Nuclear power, I happen to believe that, you know, under very special conditions, nuclear power, you know, is a very safe form of energy.
But it's also a deadly instrument in the time of war, dropping nuclear bombs on people.
At the same time, the danger, if people don't assume the responsibility of a nuclear power plant, they could be very dangerous.
But I think it produces endless energy.
Just think of nuclear energy on a submarine.
That's been around for 60 years.
And I keep thinking, there's those sailors in a nuclear submarine.
They go under the water for months after months, sleeping next to the nuclear reactor.
And it has to be pretty safe.
So whether it's nuclear power or drones or whatever, the government's always tempted to use it.
Now, the technology and the use of some of the spying equipment, just think of what the government has done to us with that.
And also, I was thinking about the creation of jobs with technology.
Technology now is available.
If private industry, the airlines were totally responsible for safety and monitoring people getting on airplane.
They could take their frequent flyers and get the flyers to agree that, well, what we'll do is we'll have a facial identification.
And if you belong, if you're coming and flying on our airplane and you've been pre-screened, there's facial identification, they could walk in and walk right past.
It would take seconds.
And just what, guess what that technology would do?
It would put a lot of people out of business.
It would put all those thousands of people out of business at the TSA.
But we would get rid of those jobs.
Now, getting rid of those jobs would be very good.
They'd be forced to go do something productive, and maybe they'd have to go to a plant and manufacture something that is very productive rather than doing the harm they do at our airports.
But technology can be very, very beneficial and used in a right way, but it's also very risky when the government gets hold of this.
You know, there was a group of people back in the early part of the 19th century that were called the Ludites.
And they went along around and they bought into the argument that the machine, the fancy textile machines, were making people unemployed.
And inside a labor dispute, this got out of hand, and thousands of people, well, at least a lot of people were killed.
It was a major event.
But there was an economic crisis then, and the economic crisis was a consequence of the Napoleonic War and a depression that followed.
But then they turned it into a fight over labor.
And because they were afraid of losing their jobs, they were in there tearing up the equipment because they didn't want to lose their jobs.
They needed workers.
And so their government was creating a condition that built fear in the people.
Then the people figured the people, the labor people, decided, well, if we just destroy the equipment, it'll be okay doing exactly the opposite of what they have should have done.
And the Ludites have been known ever since then for people who can't stand and fear a technology advance.
And that, of course, is the wrong way to go.
But to sort this out, there's only one thing you need to do.
You need to think about how it would be worked out in a voluntary fashion with respect to other people's lives and property and do it in a fashion that both sides of the debate or whatever is going on are agreeable to it.
And that means the transitions would be much better.
People shouldn't get hysterical by any technology taking jobs away and they shouldn't get hysterical about drones.
And I think, once again, see, it's a basic understanding of what personal liberty is all about and how the marketplace solves our solution, solves our problem.
All we have to do is have the proper role of government, and that would go a long way to providing a situation where these kind of issues couldn't be demagogued and fear used to do all sorts of things that they shouldn't be doing, including the silly things that we do in foreign policy as well.
Fear is a horrible thing to use to intimidate the people to go along with big government and to go along with the planners that always want to run our lives and run our economy.
Thanking MythBusters00:00:11
So, Chris, I want to thank you for being with us today on MythBusters.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today to MythBusters.