I may be coming out as a commie, but I am pretty sympathetic to these arguments.

It's easy to say that people have always worried about the distributional effects of automation and that those worries have usually been overblown. While this is true, it's also true that the effects of automation have given rise to major unrest, as well as in many cases enhanced worker protections and power. We may simply be coming into a part of the cycle where that balance is once again disrupted in favor of capital.

In any case, I am much less hostile to progressive taxation (depends how you do it) than I am to government attempts to allocate resources. If the revenues raised by the progressive taxation had a straightforward and transparent way to be reallocated to the poor, without much scope for red tape or corruption, I wouldn't automatically be against it. The question, of course, is whether that level of scoping is possible, given the nature of the leviathan