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From page 43 of the book "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt / June 1978
The Fetish of Full Employment
THE ECONOMIC GOAL of any nation, as of any individual, is to get the
greatest results with the least effort. The whole economic progress of mankind has
consisted in getting more production with the same labor. It is for this reason that
men began putting burdens on the backs of mules instead of on their own; that they
went on to invent the wheel and the wagon, the railroad and the motor truck. It is
for this reason that men used their ingenuity to develop a hundred thousand labor-
saving inventions.
All this is so elementary that one would blush to state it if it were not being con-
stantly forgotten by those who coin and circulate the newslogans. Translated into
national terms, this first principle means that our real objective is to maximize pro-
duction. In doing this, full employment -- that is, the absence of involuntary idle-
ness(embecomes a necessary byproduct. But production is the end, employment
merely the means. We cannot continuously have the fullest production without full
employment. But we can very easily have full employment without full produc-
tion.
Primitive tribes are naked, and wretchedly fed and housed, but they do not suffer
from unemployment. China and India are incomparably poorer than ourselves, but
the main trouble from which they suffer is primitive production methods (which
are both a cause and a consequence of a shortage of capital) and not unemploy-
ment. Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from
the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself. Hitler provided full
employment with a huge armament program. World War II provided full employ-
ment for every nation involved. The slave labor in Germany had full employment.
Prisons and chain gangs have full employment. Coercion can always provide full
employment.
Yet our legislators do not present Full Production bills in Congress but Full
Employment bills. Even committees of businessmen recommend ‘‘a President’s
Commission on Full Employment,’’ not on Full Production, or even on Full
Employment and Full Production. Everywhere the means is erected into the end,
and the end itself is forgotten.
Wages and employment are discussed as if they had no relation to productivity and
output. On the assumption that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done, the
conclusion is drawn that a thirty-hour week will provide more jobs and will there-
fore be preferable to a forty-hour week. A hundred make-work practices of labor
unions are confusedly tolerated. When a Petrillo threatens to put a radio station out
of business unless it employs twice as many musicians as it needs, he is supported
by part of the public because he is after all merely trying to create jobs. When we
had our WPA, it was considered a mark of genius for the administrators to think of
projects that employed the largest number of men in relation to the value of the
work performed -- in other words, in which labor was least efficient.
It would be far better, if that were the choice -- which it isn’t -- to have maxi-
mum production with part of the population supported in idleness by undisguised
relief than to provide ‘‘full employment’’ by so many forms of disguised make-
work that production is disorganized. The progress of civilization has meant the
reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increas-
ingly wealthyasanation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor,
to remove the necessity of work for manyofthe aged and to makeit unnecessary
for millions of women to takejobs. A much smaller proportion of the American
population needs to work than that, say, ofChina or of Russia. The real question is
not howmanymillions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but
howmuch shall we produce, and what, in consequence, will be our standard of liv-
ing? The problem of distribution on which all the stress is being put today, isafter
all more easily solved the more there is to distribute.
We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs -- on
policies that will maximize production.
------end of this article by Mr. Hazlitt -- See analysis immediately below---------
The following is by Martin Carbone --
WHAT? Maximum production means maximum use of machines and technology.
That means a minimum amount of human labor and maximum "unemployment".
That means we will have reached Buckminster Fuller's dream of full efficiency
wherein a few of us will be providing everything we need and the rest of can be
pleasantly unemployed and spend our time doing whatever we want. Heaven on Earth.
I think Mr. Hazlitt has had his mind twisted and solidified in confusion where he
thinks we must have Full Employment to survive.
In spite of taking on this subject and writing "THE ECONOMIC GOAL of any
nation, as of any individual, is to get the greatest results with the least effort" (first
sentence above) he simply can't accept the fact that we should be shooting for
Full Unemployment.