The End of Artificial Employment
Roman Kireev 

The real scandal of our time is not that artificial intelligence is replacing human labor. The scandal is that so much of that labor was misallocated to begin with. AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.

For decades, vast portions of the workforce have been diverted away from productive enterprise into roles sustained not by consumer demand, but by the state: artificial credit, regulatory protection, state contracts, and legal coercion. Entire departments and job functions endured not because they created value, but because they were politically entrenched and institutionally shielded from market forces.

This was never sustainable. In a free market, every expense must be justified by service to the consumer. But under interventionist rule, firms become bureaucratic shells, propped up by privilege. Jobs no longer exist to produce, but to manage compliance, simulate productivity, perform DEI rituals, and coordinate ever-expanding layers of meaningless supervision.

What we’re witnessing today is not a disruption caused by AI: it is the terminal stage of the statist order. AI merely hastened the reckoning. It exposed the absurdity of arrangements that should never have existed. They are not being replaced by machines. They are being destroyed by truth.

Yet the deeper tragedy is not the liquidation of artificial jobs, it is that no real jobs are allowed to replace them. The economy is no longer permitted to reallocate labor. The state has rendered economic correction illegal.

In starting a small business, regulation and taxes strangle you before your first invoice. You cannot grow organically—compliance costs and reporting burdens scale faster than your revenues. You cannot hire freely—labor laws and credentialing barriers exclude the most productive and most willing. You cannot even work informally—licenses, audits, and fines ensure that peaceful production outside state channels is criminalized.

Meanwhile, the few mega-corporations still standing—capable of navigating the legal labyrinth—are bloated beyond reason, hemorrhaging staff they never needed but were afraid to cut. These firms are so deeply entwined with the state that they cannot function without its support, yet are simultaneously being suffocated by its mandates. The very system that once protected them is now destroying them.

This is not capitalism in crisis. This is capitalism denied.

The result is an economy that cannot grow or correct—only decay. The illusion of productivity has collapsed. The scaffolding that sustained it is crumbling. Rather than loosen its grip, the state tightens it.

This is no temporary downturn or a technological disruption. It is the endgame of interventionism—a regime collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. It is state capitalism devouring itself.

 

Roman Kireev is a recluse. An aesthete. A collector of dangerous ideas. Some consider him a threat to international stability. His essays are translated with caution, footnoted in diplomatic cables, and banned in at least two central banks.

Officially educated in Europe — though accounts diverge. Some claim he studied semiotics under an excommunicated structuralist in Paris; others suggest he lectured on economics in Austria under a false name before vanishing for three years. Only to resurface with a manuscript so volatile, three editors were hospitalized after reading it. One was permanently changed.

He is said to reside in a collapsing Palladian palazzo near Vicenza, lit by candelabras and shared with two former Viennese opera singers. He writes in ink. Drinks absinthe. And has never once used a calculator. His email address is [email protected].

 

 

mises.org