Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Productivity allows us to work less and get more for our labor. The Industrial Revolution was just the start; productivity has been on an upward slope ever since, and eventually increasing productivity, usually through automation, will lead us to Star Trek Replicator levels of goods & services. However, whether it's automation or shifting jobs overseas, it won't be an easy ride for the Middle Class who need the missing jobs. Several solutions have been presented to alleviate this problem, the most insidious being just giving everyone money to do nothing. That sounds ridiculous on its face, and it is, but to people who have no job, or hate their job, it sounds wonderful so they don't examine the illogic too closely, namely, where does the money come from if no one's working? Granted, we could simply print money, but other nations have tried that with disastrous results, or we could engage in the magical thinking that enough people will want to work so that the rest of us can drink margaritas down at the beach and create art.

Which brings us to an even more important reason for jobs: to indoctrinate citizens with a work ethic because people can only be unproductively lying on the beach by impinging on the liberty of others. Teaching & maintaining work ethic is essential to a functional society, but if society expects it citizens to work then it better provide jobs. In fact, guaranteed, State-sponsored jobs would cure a lot of ills, but people need something worthwhile to do. Make-Work projects may be okay for initial training & as a penalty, but no one wants their effort to simply be Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. Luckily, infrastructure jobs both imbue Work Ethic and are an investment in society. There are millions of unemployed people who could fill all aspects of infrastructure: planning, management, journeyman, and of course, menial labor for even the most unskilled of us.