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 constantly forgotten by those who coin and
circulate the new slogans. Translated into national terms, this
first principle means that our real objective is to maximize
production. In doing this, full employment—that is, the absence
of involuntary idleness —becomes 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 production.
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 unemployment. 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
employment 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
therefore 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 maximum 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 increasingly wealthy as a nation that
we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove
the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary
for millions of women to take jobs. A much smaller
proportion of the American population needs to work than
that, say, of China or of Russia. The real question is not how
many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from
now, but how much shall we produce, and what, in consequence,
will be our standard of living? The problem of distribution,
on which all the stress is being put today, is after 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.
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 constantly forgotten by those who coin and
circulate the new slogans. Translated into national terms, this
first principle means that our real objective is to maximize
production. In doing this, full employment—that is, the absence
of involuntary idleness —becomes 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 production.
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 unemployment. 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
employment 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
therefore 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 maximum 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 increasingly wealthy as a nation that
we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove
the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary
for millions of women to take jobs. A much smaller
proportion of the American population needs to work than
that, say, of China or of Russia. The real question is not how
many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from
now, but how much shall we produce, and what, in consequence,
will be our standard of living? The problem of distribution,
on which all the stress is being put today, is after 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment