How do you create enough work to occupy the people when most work can be automated?
You do it by ensuring that government policy does not create barriers to sound economic theory.
Hume and
le Monceau et al: you encourage specialisation ie the division of labour, allowing individuals to have more time to do what they do best and buy from others what they do better.
Adam Smith: you seek to expand free trade across the globe as self-sufficiency is a road map to poverty. You reduce taxation as both an incentive to produce and because we understand thanks to
Menger, Walras and
Jevons that value is subjective those that earn incomes are in a better position to know how to spend their money than distant bureaucrats. You fully privatise the means of production as this improves efficiency, resource allocation and reduces waste and environmental harm and avoids the wealth destroying broken window fallacy
Ricardo explained. According to
Mises you introduce sound money ie competing private currencies that consumers freely choose to protect their wealth, this includes gold backed currencies, redeemable private company credit notes and relatively stable cryptocurrencies that prevent governments from creating periods of boom/bust in assets through their policies of expanding credit. And lastly for now
Hoppe and
Rothbard argue you replace the State, or at least according to
Jefferson and
Madison limit its powers to upholding liberty and ensuring a welfare safety net.
So if governments listen to the great economic theorists, there will always be work as long as humans have needs and desires even in the unlikely scenario that much of the work we do today will be automated. And if Gorbachev and de Klerk voluntarily destroyed their regimes, there is hope for our less sinister nations.
