Should this be a pigeon post?

[Notes on Ch 7 The Curse of Machinery] 

The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat. 

If it were indeed true that the introduction of labor-saving machinery is a cause of constantly mounting unemployment and misery, the logical conclusions to be drawn would be revolutionary, not only in the technical field but for  our whole concept of civilization. Not only should we have to regard all further technical progress as a calamity; we should have to regard all past technical progress with equal horror. Every day each of us in his own activity is engaged in trying to reduce the effort it requires to accomplish a given result. Each of us is trying to save his own labour, to economize the means required to achieve his ends. Every employer, small as well as large, seeks constantly to gain his results more economically and efficiently - that is, by saving labor. Every intelligent workman tries to cut down the effort necessary to accomplish his assigned job. The most ambitious of us try tirelessly to increase the results we can achieve in a given number of hours. The technophobes, if they were logical and consistent, would have to dismiss all this progress and ingenuity as not only useless but viscous. 

Case Study:
A clothing manufacturer gets a machine that makes coats at half the price. Half the labour force are let go as this machine is bought.
Now, this machine didn't drop from the sky. So offsetting this loss of labour at the clothing factory is employment in the machine manufacturing industry.
But after the machine has produced the economies expected and has offset its cost, the manufacturer has profits. And with that three things can be done:
a) an expansion of operations (buying more machines to make more coats)
b) investing in some other industry
c) spending on consuming something [being a 'fat cat' if you like!!]
So, every pound of the profit that this machine brings that the manufacturer did not have before and that he is not paying to coat makers, goes in indirect wages to the new machine makers, or workers in other capital using industries, or the builders of the new house, or the jewelers or the chefs or the car industry or whatever!
But more than this ... if these machines do generate profit, others coat makers will copy and soon the price of coats will drop as competition hots up between manufacturers. So there will be savings for consumers too. And this means more money in a household budget for other things... benefiting other industries. It may also mean that more people can afford a coat, such that more overcoats are made than before ... even allowing the expansion of that industry and the employment  over time of many more workers than there were originally.

The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare. 

Economics in One Lesson (p 49-60)