I've scolded scientists for their pinhole vision, but they are hardly unique.

when you have a very efficient economic sector what happens is that it tends to go away. Consider agriculture. Our modern-day agricultural technology is way better than what was available 200 years ago. But agricultural progress hasn’t meant that everyone goes to work in the super-charged high-tech agriculture of the future. It’s meant that more food than ever is grown with fewer person-hours of labor than ever. . . And that’s how the whole private sector part of the economy will go. Markets, doing their work, will make those sectors more and more efficient leading them to shrink as a share of the overall economic pie. What will be left is big government. Or, rather, bigger and bigger government.

some progressives wish to argue that government is fairly efficient (low Medicare overhead costs is a common observation here); in those sectors this argument won't apply. Second, if a given activity could go to either the private or public sector, we might be reluctant to stick it in the less-productivity-enhancing public sector. Third, many government activities should benefit greatly from private sector technological advancement (electricity, cars, internet, etc.), yet we don't usually observe those sectors shrinking rapidly, as a percentage of gdp, as a consequence. This should worry us.

What has happened in agriculture is specialization. The people who make the materials and equipment and perform varied services are still employed in agriculture in a meaningful sense. Materials such as fertilizer and seed that each farmer of 200 years ago largely produced are now done by specialists. Services include everything from domestic help to financial services and computer geeks.

Automation has happened too, but it isn't free. Someone makes, sells and services the automatons. Automation within the agricultural support system has also occurred, but the same sort of specialization concepts apply.

Many of those supports are produced offshore, and many of the products of agriculture are exported too. It goes both ways. We import and export everything, including food and fiber.

When you look at a more realistic picture, the idea that the only place left for people to work is in government, is nonsensical. People would have work even if government got smaller rather than larger, and arguably would be far better off. And, if government was not an extremely poor way to do things, then it would also employ an ever diminishing number of people due to automation and specialization.

It isn't automation, specialization or any other economic force that leads to ever more bloated government. It's more like the problems that any old system has. It's sclerotic and inefficient. Old procedures are crufted up with patches and feature creep, so it consumes an ever greater percentage of resources while producing less value. . . just like your legacy software.

This is true at all levels of government and in their captive systems, such as education. What is needed is painfully obvious, but so many in society are employed as government parasites that change is precluded by self interest. The society as a whole must die before the leeches will release their holds. One can argue that it might be possible to educate society and appeal to its better instincts, ethics or whatever, but the probability is extremely low. Productivity and austerity are for the subjects, not their masters. We are hagridden souls who will find release only in collapse.