[eli_gottlieb]

This has nothing to do with socialism per se, only with the balance of labor versus physical capital as input factors of production. All existing social-insurance systems were built under the assumption that production was an innately labor-intensive process, and thus that setting a payroll tax on labor would be sufficient to fund the insurance programs, provided unemployment was kept away from depression levels by other means.

Today those programs face a double-drainage problem: more people are using unemployment insurance, top-ups for low-wage workers, and old-age pensions at the same time, while less money is being contributed due to continuing depression-levels of unemployment and underemployment. Insofar as the EU expects roboticization to contribute to this double-drainage problem by shifting the labor-to-capital balance in factors of production further towards physical capital, they're trying to rebalance the insurance systems by taking more contribution from the capital side.

In short, they're trying to shift the tax burden to people who have money available to pay, rather than to people who increasingly don't.

It's a shitty kludge from a long-term public-policy perspective because it does nothing to solve the conflict over the economic pie between labor, financial capital, physical capital, and intellectual expertise, but as accountant-logic, it works out.