I'll be interested to see if any manifesto can plot a path through societies looming issues. I don't see a scenario where we can maintain our current style of capitalism without things breaking down in one way or another.

You're friend in Argentina:

* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.

* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.

* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.

>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?

Now you are getting to the root of the issue.

We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.

We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.

In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.

You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.

>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving

Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.

During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.

If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.

My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.

When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.