Mark Gresham | 10 SEP 2026
The argument goes like this: if AI displaces a large share of jobs, society will need massive socialist handouts to keep functioning because “robots don’t buy anything.” But the argument is hardly new.
Every generation has made this exact argument and been proven wrong. Steam engines, tractors, assembly lines, computers, and the internet all “stole jobs” and “didn’t buy anything.” Output exploded anyway, prices fell, new industries appeared, and living standards rose. That is the actual historical record, not a theory.
Consider cotton as one example: For generations, the crop was harvested by hand, often with enslaved labor. Then the gin and later the mechanical picker arrived. Those machines bought nothing. They simply made cotton vastly cheaper and more abundant. Textile mills, clothing, shipping, retail, and a thousand downstream jobs followed. The economy did not require “socialist handouts to all the displaced pickers” to keep functioning. It required the opposite: letting productivity compound.
The claim that AI uniquely breaks this pattern because “robots don’t consume” is the same lump-of-labor error dressed in new clothes. Machines have never been the customers. People with higher real incomes and cheaper goods have. If your model of vitality requires freezing 1840s labor methods in place, it is not an economic argument. It is a museum exhibit. ■
Read more by Mark Gresham.
.png){kind=logo}