, Columnist
Taxing Robots Is a Great Way to Make People Poor
It’s an economically disastrous response to an imaginary problem.
Robots are our friends.
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Of all the ideas that presidential candidates are offering to address the country’s economic woes, here’s one of the worst: Taxing, or even outlawing, automation.
Many people worry about the prospect of automation causing mass unemployment. This might be justified in the science-fiction future, if machines learn to do anything a human can do. But there’s no sign that the robot takeover is happening anytime soon.