"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Rise Of The Machines = Decline Of Human Beings?
"The banks have imposed the costs of their incompetence, greed, and corruption on taxpayers. Indeed, the socialized firms in England and France were more efficiently run and never threatened the national economies, much less the entire world, with ruin as do the private US “banks too big to fail.” The English, French, and communists never had to print $1,000 billion dollars annually to save a handful of corrupt and incompetent financial enterprises."
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It's weird to see Paul Craig Roberts sounding like a communist. It's also strange to see him describing what we have now as a free market.
A good find, A Magnus! Paul Craig Roberts has done some good work. I recall his outstanding portrait of govenment health care in the waning years of the USSR, for example.
In this piece however he competely fails to follow his own logic. Near the start he correctly writes "This [free-market] theory doesn’t work when the US government socializes cost and privatizes profits" but doesn't stop right there and observe that when government does that, no free market is operating. Any and all bad consequences result therefore not from a free market but from the absence of a free market.
The obvious answer is to dispense with government so that a free market can operate; but Roberts is a conservative, not an anarchist, so he won't let himself propose that.
Will a free society handle the problem of robots replacing human labor? - of course. The replacement or enhancement of labor by tools has been going on since our Race first evolved, and the result has been by far the most successful species on Earth.