They're saying the machines are coming for the jobs again. I've heard this song before — heard it when the tractor put the farmhand out of work, heard it when the automobile scared the buggy-whip makers, heard it when the automatic elevator threatened every elevator operator in New York. Somehow humanity survived. I'd bet a fair sum we'll survive this one too, though I understand why the man who just got a pink slip doesn't find that terribly comforting. Let's think it through properly instead of wringing our hands.

Start with the point almost everyone gets backward: the purpose of an economy is not to create jobs. If it were, I could put half the country to work digging holes and the other half filling them in, and we'd have full employment and be considerably poorer for it. The purpose of an economy is to produce goods and services people want, using the fewest resources necessary — including the resource of human labor. Every time a machine does work more cheaply than a person, it frees that person's labor to produce something else nobody could afford to have produced before. That is not a tragedy. That is the entire process by which a poor country becomes a rich one. In 1900 about 40 percent of American workers were on farms; by the time I was writing on this subject it was under 3 percent, and somehow we were not all starving in bread lines — we had, instead, television repairmen, airline pilots, and economists, occupations nobody in 1900 could have named because they didn't exist yet.

The trouble is what my friend Bastiat called the seen and the unseen. Every displaced worker is visible — you can put his face on the evening news. The jobs that