That’s because Progressives are human, just like almost everybody else, and we like to save money when we can. And one popular way to save money is to buy from companies that sell things to us at lower cost because they “cut out the middleman,” which includes pretty much anybody in sales or distribution.
Fifty years ago, back when Sears was America’s largest retailer, you could walk into a Sears store and easily find a salesperson to help you find something. Then came Walmart, which mostly didn’t have salespeople (just stockers and register operators), and Sears was forced to cut costs to stay competitive. That meant reducing the number of salespeople. Then came Amazon, with no “big box” costs at all, and now Sears is on the verge of being only a memory. But we consumers, Conservative and Progressive alike, can buy things much cheaper than we used to be able to. So it’s all good, right?
And now comes Tesla, which has taken it one step further. From an article in Market Watch, which discusses Tesla’s sales model of selling direct from the factory, with no network of local dealerships:
Auto dealers, an asset to car companies today, are tomorrow’s liabilities, as Tesla’s direct distribution and service model should provide a cost advantage once it gets to scale. Tesla’s model is more customer-friendly and efficient, allowing the company to capture the profit that [traditional] carmakers share with their dealers.
[Emphasis added.]
Buy online direct from Tesla! No more costs for dealers and salespeople! I can pay less for my green electric car! Yay! (And the unemployed salespeople and other dealer employees, when every carmaker converts to the new sales model? Well, they can find other jobs, can’t they?)
That’s the problem with not just Tesla, but the whole “free market” system (which I basically favor, as apparently do most here on Kos, but not without some controls to prevent abuse.) It has done a generally good job at allowing most people to earn enough to get by, but it has no built-in protection against this sort of consolidation and job elimination. As long as people see “labor” as just another “cost,” and as long as the goal of producers is to lower “costs” as much as possible, “labor” will continue to decline. And that is why I think it is inevitable that eventually—maybe not for a long time yet, but possibly not that long—some sort of guaranteed basic wage will become unavoidable. There simply won’t be enough demand for unskilled labor for it to continue to be a source of income for the many. Not when buyers don’t want to pay more for something they can get from machines for much less.
And that is why government is necessary. There is no other means for providing a reliable guaranteed income, and that will be the only way to protect the “general welfare” of Americans in days to come.
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Edit:
This piece isn’t about Tesla. Tesla is just an example of the trend. Part of the point is that, while in the early days of automation the people whose jobs were eliminated could generally find other employment, we are reaching a point where whole categories of jobs are simply disappearing forever. Just from reading newspapers, without benefit of a crystal ball, anybody can foresee a day not far off when there is no need for humans to:
drive buses and taxis
fly airplanes
check out your groceries or any other purchases
cook your fast food
That is a lot of jobs about to disappear. And when robots can clean motel rooms and harvest the kinds of crops that currently require human hands, there go a lot more jobs. It’s only a matter of time, and not much of it.