Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

A Robot Tax Is a Bad Idea

A French politician sends the wrong message with his proposed tax on robotics.

January 23, 2017 at 1:15 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Don't blame me.
Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi

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The ideas of France's Benoit Hamon, the surprise front-runner in the presidential primaries of the Socialist Party, are far to the left of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and even the U.K. Labour Party's Jeremy Corbyn. This, of course, is the era of the expanding Overton Window, with radical ideas bursting into the mainstream. One Hamon proposal in particular, however, should never make it: A tax on robots, based on the premise that their proliferation is bad for human employment.

Hamon's most discussed proposal is a 750 euro ($805) monthly universal basic income for the French. It doesn't make much sense, primarily because 750 euros is well below the poverty line in France. But it's also expensive, so Hamon proposes new taxes to fund it. The robot tax is one of them.