I’ve been thinking about this for months, and it’s keeping me up at night. Not in some sci-fi, Terminator-skynet way (though that’s still on the table), but in a much more immediate, political way.
Artificial intelligence, combined with robotics, is about to obliterate the labor market as we know it. And if conservatives don’t get out in front of this with a coherent, principled response, the Marxists are going to win the argument by default.
Don’t take my word for it. Even Bernie Sanders (yes, that Bernie Sanders) just wrote a lengthy piece in The Guardian sounding the alarm. He quotes Elon Musk saying AI and robots will replace all jobs and “working will be optional.” Bill Gates saying humans “won’t be needed for most things.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warning that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish.
Studies now project that AI, automation, and robotics could eliminate nearly 100 million American jobs in the next decade alone. Truck drivers (47%), accountants (64%), teaching assistants (65%), fast-food workers (89%), even 40% of registered nurses. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the trajectory we’re on.
And here’s the part that should terrify every small-government conservative: when the cotton-field workers are robots instead of human beings, the old arguments about “redistribution = slavery” stop working.
Let me say that again.
For decades, the core moral case against socialism has been simple and airtight: You do not have a positive “right” to health care, housing, or income, because that would require forcing other human beings to provide it for you. That is a form of slavery.
That argument has carried the day (mostly) because it was factually correct in a world where value is created exclusively by human labor.
But what happens when the value is created by machines that nobody owns in the moral sense? When the “labor” is performed by code and silicon that feels no pain, has no family, and never asks for a day off?
Suddenly, taxing the profits of an AI company and giving people a check doesn’t look like theft from a fellow citizen. It looks like harvesting the fruit of a machine.
And if you have tens of millions of unemployed or under-employed people watching robots flip their burgers, drive their trucks, and write their spreadsheets while they can’t feed their kids… the socialist pitch writes itself.
“You’re going to feed my children and put a roof over our heads, and the robot is paying for it? Where do I sign?”
That’s not 2035 fantasy. That’s 2028-2032 reality if we don’t adapt.
Look at the polling right now. Rasmussen and others have repeatedly found that a shocking percentage of Trump 2024 voters—especially the younger ones—say they are fine with “socialism” as long as it’s defined as government making sure nobody starves in an age of abundance. These aren’t campus radicals. These are the kids who put Trump over the top in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
They didn’t grow up in the world many of us did—where you got a factory job or a trade, worked 35 years for the same company, and retired with a pension. That world is already gone for most of them, and AI is about to bury the corpse.
So the question for the post-Trump Republican Party is brutal and unavoidable:
How do we defend negative rights—speech, privacy, property, association—in a world where the old positive-rights arguments suddenly sound plausible to a majority of voters?
I don’t have the full answer yet. Nobody does. But I know this: clinging to 1980s fusionism or 2010s libertarian purism isn’t going to cut it. “Just let the free market handle it” works when the market still needs human beings with rights. It starts to break down when the market runs fine without them.
We are going to have to do the hard philosophical work of re-applying first principles to a post-labor economy. Because principles that ignore reality aren’t principles—they’re museum pieces.
If we fail to do that work, we will watch the Left nationalize the robots, tax their output at 90%, and redistribute the proceeds while telling everyone conservatives only care about billionaires and their machines.
And in a world where the machines are doing everything and people are hungry, that message will win.
The clock is ticking. The technology is not waiting for us to finish our internal seminar on Milton Friedman.
2028 is right around the corner. The post-Trump GOP that emerges will either have a coherent vision for human liberty in an age of intelligent machines… or it will be swept away by the first ideology that promises bread in an age when circuses are programmed by algorithm.
I’d prefer we choose the former. But that means we start the conversation now—not after the first million truck drivers are permanently idled.
The robots are coming. Our job is to make sure liberty isn’t the next thing they replace.
