So take automation: you have rising costs, a labor force increasingly refusing to work for slave wages, and a technological alternative is coming into play. The logical approach is to use this technology, just as has always been done when entire sectors of labor vanish throughout history. So sure, it's logical, but that doesn't make it a 'market correction'. A real market correction would not only be a strategy taken to deal with a condition, but also one whose result was a stable economy, with good productivity, that provides the most for all.
That isn't a market at all, at least not in the context of economics and "free markets." That is a rigid, regulated, planned
and static economy where
nothing can be allowed to change--even the weather.
Anything that vaguely resembles the "Free Market" is subject to
disruption, be that the introduction of agriculture, the invention of the wheel, animal husbandry, the introduction of bronze weapons/tools, the transition to the use of iron and eventually steel, and then on into the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the use of electricity.
Automation through the use of electronics is just one more step along that chain. And if your priority is
stability in your economy, then you have to
stop innovation. If "providing the most for all" is the priority instead, then you need to have a planned economy, but your challenge then is determining who your planners are, and what criteria they're supposed to be using to determine which option is "better" for everyone. And in any case, you're then having to filter innovation through that core group of planners so they get to decide how to handle the resulting disruptions caused by that new innovation.
Take away any of these clauses and it's not a market correction, just a failure. The 'free market' ceases to be any kind of market if the economy collapses outright.
See, here is part of the problem, the "Free market" has been a myth for several decades now, there are distortions
everywhere in the national and international markets because nations are imposing either artificial restrictions, or artificial subsidies, on selected items in the name of their respective national interests. This also plays into immigration policy at points(as the UK is acutely feeling now that the EU work visas no longer apply there).
If you've been distorting a market, you need to be very careful about
how you end the distortion depending on what the impact of said distortion was. It appears that for the UK, EU work visa's greatly suppressed wages for Commercial Truck drivers due to the flood of cheap labor from more impoverished portions of the EU. Brexit brought an end to that flood of cheap and legal labor, and now the market is needing to correct for the disparity that was created by the sudden loss of that labor pool.
A "market based recovery" is still likely to be faster than almost anything the government can do to correct it. But it does means there are going to be shortages and supply restrictions while the market sorts itself out(and prices go up to support the higher operating costs of domestic freight companies handling those transportation needs). About the only thing the government can do is provide programs to help fund people getting the needed training to do the job, at which point it is up to the freight companies--and their customers, to agree upon freight rates to make it work.
This has always been a danger, and is one reason you have significant government oversight on not allowing certain companies to fail. Most people are vehemently against this too-big-to-fail mentality, but the converse would be an economic domino effect where utter destruction ensues.
As it specifically relates to freight and the associated dominoes, you do realize most of these problems are
a direct result of government actions? (Re: Covid)
If the European model is much like the US, most of those freight companies(although not always the driver, although sometimes that can be one and the same) are paid by the truckload. Anything that delays that truckload(like major delays due to needing to test drivers for covid at national borders) is eating into the revenues for those companies, and by extension their drivers. That is a market distortion, and on caused by the Government.
Likewise, the UK's sudden driver shortage was a government triggered market disruption caused by a change in government policy.
The Governments screwed things up, and somehow it is the companies in the involved markets that are at fault?
So clearly someone has to do something to prevent that. The case of automated jobs (which could eventually be most jobs) is the lynchpin argument against a free market system always having the right answer.
I'm going to disagree, up to a point. Automation
is the answer when "the market" makes automation more viable than employing humans to do the work.
If humans don't want to do the work, why are insisting that some human be forced to do so, and that an employer be forced to pay them for said work? That is an inefficient allocation of resources all the way around.
There would be no answer at all to a scenario where there are simply no jobs to be had. So that's why I say that automation (like replacing drivers) is absolutely not a good argument for the market always correcting itself and settling back into a good business cycle; it's more like the opposite, where it pushes us toward its utter demise.
Now you're no longer talking about markets in the normal sense. You're talking about
creating a new market distortion. And I agree that something like the UBI is looming in our future as the "most efficient" means of addressing that issue. But you're otherwise "stuck" in an older paradigm that isn't considering what a "post-automation" society with a UBI could likely do to address much of this. "Work" would still exist for those who choose to pursue it, either because that is their passion, or because they want to live better than someone on UBI alone can do. But considering we live in a digital age, so long as they're able to obtain a digital presence, their options to "exceed the UBI" are basically limited only by their imagination and willingness to see it through.