Why?

Why bother running a factory to produce things simply to give away to people who can't give you anything in return?

With health care costs and benefits, doesn't it cost MORE to hire a full time worker than two part time workers?

They're in jail or dead.

I stand corrected. But my company pays monthly.

Depends on the job. Most salaried workers get paid monthly in the US.

Automation doesn't occur unless labor costs are higher than the cost of automating away that job

FTFY. Lots of things can be automated that would pay a human only minimum wage, but it's even cheaper for a machine to do it.
Just because automation is happening doesn't mean people are paid well. Cost of automation goes down all the time.

Didn't see the OP, never mind.

If someone breaks into your house and steals something, you're not allowed to hunt them down, break into their house, and steal it back.

This is very true. We would already be in sharp decline if we had freely available contraception, but there is a strong segment of the population that would ban it outright if they could, including some politicians who were in the running for president this last election.

Essentially. I'd imagine they'd let us starve to death, and anyone who wasn't happy with that could embrace a hail of lead.

And then the elites put themselves into gated communities with automated turrets set to kill anything that moves within range.

The part that a lot of people did not understand was that it was a marginal tax rate increase. That means that if you made $200,001 in a year, only $1 would be taxed at the hire rate given a $200,000 cutoff. People seemed to think that once you went into a higher tax bracket, ALL you income would be taxed at the high rate. What that all boils down to is that only the very rich would feel the tax increase.

This "misunderstanding" was being pushed intentionally to scare people. It's been debunked many, many times, but keeps coming back because it's an easily understood (though completely incorrect) way to make people scared of taxes.

If you cared enough, you could keep track of each of their new releases and warn your friends ahead of time of all the nonsense that went on with previous releases. That would probably hurt them a bit.

Cost of living is going up everywhere you can hire programmers. It's not a race to the bottom (Bangalore is more expensive than many American cities now), it just takes a generation or two to level out.

Great! I'll just wait a few generations, and I'll be rolling in money!

Or the people who own everything decide they don't need us anymore, use their automation power to buy up all the land over a period of time until we have no where to live, and they simply dedicate all their robotic power to themselves as we sit outside their gated communities (with automated turrets shooting at anything that moves) starving to death.