The point the essay tries to make is that our whole economy is based on the industrial model of employers and employees, and a "job" as the E-ticket that buys you food, shelter, and life itself. And yet the employer side of the economy, with the active help of their employees, have ruthlessly focused on developing technology that eliminates jobs.

That's a case of shooting ourselves in the foot.

You're right insofar as most of our history goes, that there's always been a rough balance between job obsolescence and job invention due to technology. That all changed a couple of decades ago when businesses focuses on productivity gains from technology not as a side effect that enhanced profits, but as an end in itself. Eliminating jobs became a business "virtue" and CEOs started being rewarded accordingly by Wall Street. Many times in recent years we've been treated to the sorry spectacle of a CEO receiving an obscene bonus after laying off thousands of workers. Christ, to any decent person presiding over layoffs is failure, not sucess! Yet that's the way the incentives go in our whacky economy.

Tom's just going around ridiculing the very idea that there could be any alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, which attitude, writ large, will spell our doom. People have been anticipating this problem for almost a century and trying to work out a solution. Robert Heinlein advocated a plan called Social Credit way back in the 1930s, that would have treated citizens as shareholders in the economy, dividends providing a subsistence level of support for everybody, and a base on which people could then pursue further ambitions.

That last point is important philosophically, because conservatives maintain that only threat of starvation keeps people working. That's nonsense, of course, as many Conservatives themselves demonstrate with tireless efforts in the pursuit of profit way beyond the need to eat. Any system like Social Credits that aims to provide subsistence for all is based on the more optimistive view of human nature, that just as many people, if not more, will use the security of a guaranteed food and shelter as a springboard to achieve their highest ambitions.

Why would ambition disappear from the world just because people have enough to eat? What a grotesque view of humanity!