If new companies spring up to provide new energy-efficient vehicles, they'll probably do all they can to get cheap labor, and minimizing labor, while avoiding "union trouble". (Fortunately for some, when there is volatility in the auto market, it means plenty of re-tooling, and re-tooling means more work for skilled machine builders, programmers, electricians, welders, etc.)

Even in China, where we outsource our lower- and lower-middle class jobs, their workers lose their jobs to automation, because it's still relatively cheap to build the machines with their cheap labor over there, and recoup their savings after only a few years, just like over here.

The very best get paid more, while the mediocre and marginal get fired and have to settle for lower and lower positions on the totem pole. Then the going rate for those jobs get bid down and down until the people doing them are living on the edge of poverty.

What happens to society when the low-level bookkeepers, ebay traders, hair and nail workers, GAP salesmen, and package delivery employees, get paid less and less, until they're finally and undeniably prole? Does society automatically swing left? Do we have a functioning constitution limiting the power of the state? If not, isn't this one of those suicidal civilization scenarios? You know - 'most democracies only last about 200 years, because when the general populace figure out they can vote themselves funds from out of the treasury, they do so, quickly bankrupting the republic.' How does that work out in a republic as big as America?

Isn't it when property is no longer held 'sacred', it loses all worth, and international capital flees? And isn't this a real possibility?

If that happens, could a new economic paradigm replace the current one within a realistic period of time to avert catastrophic failure of our complex capitalistic division-of-labor society? I mean, the American economy can't just stop.

Regardless of which side you sit on the issue - if you're a 'hard core' wealth-redistribution lefty, then you must understand the power of the communist utopian dream (the proletarian revolution, and all that), and if you're on the right, then you must understand the simple argument relating asset value to property rights enforcement - the possibility that a catasrophic failure of the current political regime, due to an extended economic crash resulting from the end of the cheap energy era, could forseeably tip the political scales towards a new unrestricted left-wing democracy, (or 'mobocracy'), and the likely resulting rise of a wealth-redistribution regime the likes of which the world has never seen, which could easily destroy the asset value of 'America Inc.' in the international capital markets.

I read sometime ago a rumor that the mint has a whole set of new money to instantly replace the old money currently in circulation, but easily distinguishable from the current bills. They would be redeemed for money currently in circulation domestically, so that international debt may be forgiven without messing with any untidy stacks of cash which might be lying around across the globe. (drug money, laundered money, mujahadeen payments, etc.)

I wonder if a FOIA request would be enough to find out if the feds have already planned for this possibility.

If they haven't, then someone should tell them that they should.