>Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of saf

>Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc). No that is not what government is all about. The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property, for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion. Where there is justification for the government using force against an individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic non-aggression principle stuff. >where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive. Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable. >once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest. Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and incentives, and is rank authoritarianism. >Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of people. Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of living, over the same time span. Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the author provides none.