The Atlantic has the article What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?

Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

This is a wonderfully eloquent way of stating a thought process that have I been trying to promote for sometime. The way I have been putting has not been as successful as I hope this way is.

The basic premise for my thought experiment is stated in the article:

Many experts believe that, unlike in the 20th century, people in this century will not be able to stay one step ahead of automation through education and the occasional skills upgrade. A recent study from Oxford University warns that 47 percent of all existing jobs are susceptible to automation within the next two decades. Worries about robots replacing human labor are showing up more frequently in the mainstream media, including the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Recent books, such as The Second Machine Age and Who Owns the Future, predict that when it comes to robots and labor, this time is different.

Perhaps this, and the numerous links in the article, will get readers to believe that I am not just blowing smoke from orifices that ought not to be blowing smoke, but there really is some intellectual substance behind the exploration of the idea.

Thanks to Randy Katz’s Facebook post for bringing this to my attention.

Doug Hoffman’s Facebook post of the C-SPAN Hillary Clinton Roundtable in New Hampshire was very enlightening.

Watching the first 15 minutes, I came away with some impressions of what would be wrong if this were her whole presidential campaign. It is certainly not her whole campaign, so keep that in mind when you read my criticism of the first part.

I think this will be a great campaign where Bernie Sanders will have little trouble differentiating himself from Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton might think that hobnobbing with small business people who can start breweries will give her a good handle on the plight of the middle class, but she is missing most of what used to be the middle class that did not own their own businesses.

Trickle down economics from the small-business class to the working class, might be a tad better than trickle-down from the wealthy, through small business, and only then on to the middle class. However, it is not a big enough vision to solve this country’s problems. And it is certainly not enough when the trickle from either level does not occur.

Small start-up businesses are not net job creators if they only steal market share from their larger competitors. Net job creation comes from creating net new product to sell to net new buyers.

I colloquially phrase that as “What part of not enough freakin’ customers do you not understand?”

I am pretty sure that Bernie Sanders, and perhaps Elizabeth Warren, could school Hillary Clinton on this topic. Otherwise, I am sure that Hillary can do a good job of getting all the Eisenhower Republican vote.

If she makes it this clear on where she stands, then I don’t see how she excites the Kennedy Democratic voters.

Now moving on to looking at this roundtable’s value in the overall political discussion, there was a lot of excellent information on what we need to do to promote the growth of small business. Enlightening everyone on the value of the programs we have and additional programs we need makes for a much more informed political discussion when these programs come before Congress for continued funding, increases or cuts to funding, or for elimination.

Hillary Clinton has shown how well she understands this aspect of our government, economy, and society. She would make a great Secretary of Commerce. She or any other Presidential candidate needs to show how these small pieces of policy and programs have to fit into a comprehensive solution to getting this country back on track. This roundtable conference is certainly a good start.