The robot that displaced a factory worker in 2019 made you richer. Not the factory owner. You. This confuses people who treat jobs as the end goal of economic life rather than the means. Henry Hazlitt demolished this error in 1946 in "Economics in One Lesson." When a machine replaces ten workers on an assembly line, those ten workers represent released labor, which redirects toward production the economy couldn't afford before. The machine, meanwhile, drops the price of the manufactured good. You buy the same shirt for less. That gap between what you pay now and what you paid before is real purchasing power, a raise you received without your employer signing anything. Let's look at televisions. A 60-inch 4K television cost around $1,500 in 2015. Today you buy comparable picture quality for under $350. Automated manufacturing drove that collapse. The factories didn't become charitable organizations; they competed for your dollars by deploying capital more efficiently, and the savings landed in your pocket. This process terrifies politicians because the benefits disperse invisibly across millions of consumers while the displaced workers are visible, concentrated, and angry. So politicians respond by subsidizing inefficiency, taxing automation (as the EU seriously proposed in 2017), or erecting tariffs that punish you for wanting cheaper goods. Every such intervention forces you to pay more than the market price, transferring your purchasing power to a protected producer and their employees. Free market thinkers have stressed one fact since Mises and Böhm-Bawerk formalized capital theory: rising capital intensity, meaning more and better machines per worker, is the entire mechanism behind rising real wages historically. Britain improved living standards between 1760 and 1850 by replacing hand-operated looms with machines, freeing labor to produce medicine, railways, and eventually the electricity grid. Automation is capital accumulation made visible. You benefit from every iteration of it, provided the state leaves the price system alone to do its work.

In 1936, Keynes famously wrote that paying people to dig holes and fill them back up would boost the economy. Meanwhile, French economist Bastiat was spinning in his grave, having warned a century earlier about the "broken window fallacy" - the illusion that destruction creates wealth. When New Deal programs put thousands to work building bridges to nowhere, Keynesians cheered the employment statistics. But they ignored what Bastiat called "the unseen" - the private investments never made, the businesses never started, the innovations never pursued because capital was diverted to government make-work. Today's politicians still invoke Keynesian magic, claiming every trillion in deficit spending creates prosperity. They see the government jobs, the infrastructure projects, the GDP bump. They don't see the entrepreneur who couldn't get a loan, the startup that never launched, or the future growth sacrificed for today's political theater.