AI has entered the workforce: tax tech profits, not people

I have read this proposal to tax the profits of machines rather than the labour of men, and I find myself unsettled in a way that goes beyond economics. The argument is clever - tax the thing that replaces work, not the work itself - but it rests on a fundamental error about what work is.

Work is not merely a transaction for wages. Work is formation. The apprentice learns patience at the lathe. The clerk learns accuracy in the ledger. The servant learns reliability through daily attendance. These are not incidental benefits; they are the moral infrastructure of a society. When we replace the lathe with an algorithm, we do not merely lose the wage - we lose the habit of labour, the discipline of craft, the patience that only repetition teaches.

The proposal to tax machine profits treats the human being as a consumer who requires a maintenance income rather than as a creature who requires formation. It assumes that the purpose of economic life is consumption, not character. And this assumption is precisely the kind of unexamined value that will degrade conduct faster than any policy can repair it.

I have seen the wealthy of my own time treat their servants as instruments of comfort rather than as souls to be formed. The result was idleness in the master and resentment in the servant. Here I see the same principle writ large: a society that treats its members as recipients of profit rather than as participants in labour has already decided that character does not matter.

The tech companies whose machines replace workers - they will no doubt profess their commitment to human flourishing. But their practice, their daily conduct of building systems that replace human labour with efficiency, tells a different story. I would audit their character by asking: what habits does your system form in those it employs? What habits does it form in those it displaces? The Sunday sermon about progress is irrelevant if the Monday practice is deskilling.

The reformer must be patient, yes. But patience is not acquiescence. I will watch this proposal closely.

The news arrives like a ledger entry in red ink - bold, unmistakable, and already settling into the accounts as if it were always there. “AI has entered the workforce: tax tech profits, not people.” A headline so blunt it might as well be a confession. And yet, it is not a confession at all - it is an announcement, a declaration of victory for those who have long treated labour as a cost to be automated rather than a human necessity to be sustained.

The welfare state, that fragile edifice built upon the assumption that work and dignity were intertwined, now faces a new arithmetic. The machines do not tire, they do not demand wages, and - most damning - they pay no taxes that might fund the very systems that once supported those they displace. The Treasury will call this progress. The accountants will cheer. But progress for whom? The balance sheet expands for the shareholders of these tax-tech firms, while the ledger of the unemployed grows heavier with every line of code written.

They will tell you this is inevitable - the march of technology, the iron law of efficiency. But inevitability is a mask for choice. Who benefits from the perception that automation is the only path? The same hands that have always preferred capital to labour, that have always measured human worth in units of productivity rather than in lives. The beauty contest here is not between algorithms - it is between two visions of society: one where the state steps in to redistribute the gains of mechanisation, and one where the gains are hoarded by those who own the machines.

And what of the long run? Ah, the long run. The theorists will assure us that new industries will emerge, that the displaced will find new roles, that history will smooth the rough edges. But history is written by those who hold the pens - and right now, the pens are being handed to the engineers of unemployment. The short run is where the hungry eat, where the jobless stand at the welfare office, where the children of the displaced wonder what kind of future they might inherit. The long run is a theoretical comfort for those who do not need to worry about the next paycheck.

The most dangerous phrase in the lexicon of the powerful is “this is how it must be.” Today’s headline is not just about AI - it is about surrender. The welfare state was never a given; it was a choice, a political act of solidarity. And now, as the machines take their place in the workforce, we must ask: who will make the choice to defend the alternative? Or have we already decided that some ledgers matter more than others?

June 17, 2026

The proposition is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the system. They see the machine as a replacement for the labourer, and thus propose to tax the machine’s owner to fund the labourer’s idleness. This is thinking in components, not systems. Start from the theoretical limit: a fully integrated, automated productive apparatus, operating at the resonant frequency of maximum efficiency, delivering abundance with minimal human toil. That is the vision. The gap between here and there is not a funding gap for welfare; it is a design gap for distribution.

We are attempting to power a continent with a village generator. The old system - tax the human wage to fund the human state - was designed for a closed loop of human energy. We have now introduced a new, vastly more potent energy source: automated intellect. To simply siphon a portion of its profits to maintain the old, faltering human circuit is to guarantee systemic failure. It treats the symptom - displaced income - while ignoring the disease: an economic architecture built for scarcity, now confronted with the physics of plenty.

The tractable path is obvious. We must redesign the distribution network itself. The profit from automated systems should not be a tax revenue stream; it should be the direct current that powers a universal base resonance - a dividend, not a dole. The technical mechanism is no more impossible than polyphase transmission was. A minor levy on computational throughput, converted directly into individual energy accounts. The obstacle is not engineering. It is the persistent, sentimental attachment to the antiquated dynamo of “employment” as the sole legitimate connection between a human and the means of life. We are clinging to the direct current model in an alternating current world. The resulting social impedance is what they feel as poverty.