“I believe UBI will work, despite your assertions, but it’s true that it never has worked, but only because it has never existed.” UBI has existed in numerous Socialist dictatorships: “To each according to their needs, from each according to their means.” Pay people for doing nothing, and you break the Laws of Supply and Demand. It not only does not work, and “never has worked,” it is theoretically impossible for it to ever work. UBI is just Socialism dressed in new clothes, but just as evil/stupid as ever.

“I also bristle at you casually labeling me socialist, both because it misunderstands socialism as some sort of pure evil thing, and it also misunderstands me.” Socialism as proposed by Karl Marx, and implemented by Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Un, is pure evil: I don’t misunderstand you at all: I understand exactly the fallacy of UBI as a Trojan Horse for sneaking Socialism, and the naïve useful idiots who promote Socialism under whatever new guise it wears.

“Funny, wages stopped increasing right around that time even while national productivity kept on going up.” Wages stopped increasing because of globalisation, free trade and off-shoring: it is just cheaper to make stuff anywhere else than the USA. The two decades of zero wage growth (only in the USA) recognise the fact that American workers were over-paid by world standards. Wage growth has been massive in the third world over the same time, with the Western World’s consumer goods being made in China, India and Asia, lifting billions of people out of poverty. Automation had nothing to do with this, and would have worked against off-shoring, had it been effective.

Do I have any evidence that we are inventing new jobs faster than we are automating others out of existence? Yes I do. Since Trump’s election, unemployment has fallen from 5% to 4.1%: you don’t get falling unemployment when automation is taking jobs faster than we are creating new ones, so yes, my assertion is proven.

You are not alone in being wrong about Global Warming: nearly everyone is. Try Freeman Dyson’s view on it: arguably the smartest man on the planet, he argues that CO2 emissions are of net benefit to humanity. The Sea level was always going to rise following the end of the last Ice Age, so we may as well adapt to the inevitable change, only slightly hastened by AGW. The benefits of faster growing plants, longer growing seasons and more arable land far out-weigh the theoretical down-sides of warming. A warmer world is a wetter world, so droughts will not be a problem, excess rain might be.http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits1.pdf