Tax the robots says Dean Baker

In this article on taxing the high frequency computer run trade. Taxing robots and denying them rights is OK by me, at least as a trial.

What about the high frequency trading robots?
These robots, when they work, simply smooth out the half seconds between human trades.  To work properly, all traders should use them and all robots should be programmed to pick up the maximum amount of micro pennies.  The end result is a simple, fair and networked trading machine for humans.  The flash crashes we have are due to human error, humans deliberately adding bugs to the robots.

But a robot tax would be temporarily good for the economy because government would encourage their use and force them to do the drudgery we humans hate. In particular I think about the street bots.  If we allowed local government a temporary tax on these things, then all local government would legalize them straight away. I say temporary because this is new territory and I have no idea of the long term consequence.