I’ve thought that if technology erodes the necessity for human labor, that humanity will proceed along one of two vectors. The first being the socialization of machine labor, where people toil less for their lifestyles. The second is akin to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, in which the wealthy rid themselves of the excess of the economically unnecessary.

In a world where information travels instantaneously, I thought the second vector difficult to achieve. When the George W. Bush administration tried to reduce the value the government places on the elderly, for the purpose of evaluating risk and liability, there was a public backlash.

But now we live in a nation where people equate freedom with the right to put the lives of others at risk. A common refrain among these people is that those who are dying are just old, or in some other way, less valuable.

Further, unfathomably, the moral calculus of press and government has been to prioritize the privacy of the dead over the people’s right to grasp the human cost and risks of COVID-19.

And what more proof do we need of the worthlessness of the lives lost to the billionaires’ economy than their continued soaring wealth?

The declining life span of modest-income Americans may not be an aberration in the future. Whether this is by some Machiavellian design or not, I don’t know, but clearly the U.S. wealthy seem to be more fixated on launching themselves into space than the life spans of their fellow Americans.

MICHAEL A. MILLER

Salem