Is Socialism Inevitable?

Chew on this.  While I am not a big fan of socialism - and it has never worked well in practice - we seem to perhaps be heading there whether we want to or not.

I attach an interesting article that notes, probably accurately, that modern technology and other increases in productivity are leading to fewer jobs and fewer hours for those who work, yet those making little still have many more luxuries than the middle class did half a century ago.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-25/peddling-fiction-after-all-job-growth-doesnt-mean-were-getting-richer

Indeed, eventually if this course continues the only jobs that will continue to exist are those that cannot be automated effectively or that we as a society will not allow to be automated with robots and computers.  Mish, for one, regularly reports on advances in technology and robotics and had this interesting piece today.  I especially found the clip about Sofia interesting.  If you watch it continue until the end of the video to hear her tell her inventor that she would be happy to destroy humans.

http://mishtalk.com/2016/03/25/meet-concierge-connie-sophia-your-medical-robot-robotic-pets-dc-delivery-bots/

So service jobs are being taken over by robots, factory jobs largely already have been automated, cars and trucks will soon drive themselves, pizza is delivered in an self-driving oven, and so forth and so on.  The next linked piece has some good stats on the ratio of robots to humans in the industrial workforce.  They go from countries with low ratios like China at 36 per 10,000 workers to South Korea with close to 500 per 10,000 workers.  It will take a while but China's ratio is catching up as it is installing record numbers of robots, leaving an interesting question on what they will do with many hundreds of millions of people needing to work.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-26/visualizing-why-manufacturing-jobs-arent-coming-back

At least in theory we are progressing ourselves out of jobs and perhaps this is part of the reason for the income disparity we are seeing.  Higher paying industrial jobs are increasingly automated, leaving only low paying service jobs and the highest paying specialized jobs, with little in between.  Money flows to the top to those who run the companies that provide us these gadgets or that lie, cheat and steal the most, and the rest of the population is settling to the bottom rung as fewer decent jobs exist.  As more and more jobs disappear there perhaps eventually will be no alternative but having the top few percent who make all the money pay enough taxes to support the rest in some basic necessities, like smart phones, big screen TVs, talking refrigerators and robots that fold our laundry - those basics.

Seriously though, there really will not be enough jobs left for everyone needing them and we will need to figure out what to do with those who cannot find work.  Is a society without work for a majority - or perhaps without even the need for a majority to work - utopia or hell?  Interesting times ahead.