The trend of employment is towards a high level, and a recurrence of chronic mass unemployment is most unlikely. The Keynesian techniques are now well understood, and there is no reason to fear a repetition of the New Deal experience of a government with the will to spend its way out of a recession, but frustrated in doing so by faulty knowledge. The political pressure for full employment is stronger than ever before; the experience of the inter-war years bit so deeply into the political psychology of the nation that full employment, if threatened, would always constitute the dominant issue at any election, and no right-wing party could now survive a year in office if it permitted the figures of unemployment which were previously quite normal.
Anthony CroslandRelated topics
bit chronic constitute deal dominant election employment experience fear full government high issue knowledge level mass nation normal now office party permit political pressure psychology quite reason recession recurrence repetition spend trend unlikely way well year years keynesian unemploymentRelated quotes
But if you are a troublemaker... it's our job to politically destroy you. Put it this way. As long as JB Jeyaretnam [Workers' Party leader] stands for what he stands for -- a thoroughly destructive force for me -- we will knock him. There are two ways of playing this. One, a you attack the policies; two, you attack the system. Jeyaretnam was attacking the system, he brought the Chief Justice into it. If I want to fix you, do I need the Chief Justice to fix you? Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That's the way I had to survive in the past. That's the way the communists tackled me. He brought the Chief Justice into the political arena.
Lee Kuan Yew
In Hawaii the United States has another possible source of undesirable immigration. The dominant element among its third of a million inhabitants is the Japanese, who have held themselves aloof from the other residents and shown little tendency to intermarry. Every Japanese child born in the islands is an American citizen, with the full right of entry to the mainland. The greater part of the rest of the population is a mongrel crowd. Chinese and native Hawaiians, until quite recently, have shown a marked tendency to intermarry. Every effort should be made to find some constitutional way by which Hawaii can be prevented from becoming a continuous source of supply of undesirable citizens of the United States.
Madison Grant
I have... instituted systematic, voluntary measures of cooperation with the business institutions and with State and municipal authorities to make certain that fundamental businesses of the country shall continue as usual, that wages and therefore consuming power shall not be reduced, and that a special effort shall be made to expand construction work in order to assist in equalizing other deficits in employment... I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. Wages should remain stable. A very large degree of industrial unemployment and suffering which would otherwise have occurred has been prevented. Agricultural prices have reflected the returning confidence. The measures taken must be vigorously pursued until normal conditions are restored.
Herbert Hoover
I find it amazing now that my first economics class, taught by Alan Sweezy, used John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Income and Employment as the textbook. Although this book is one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, it makes a really lousy textbook. Moreover, since I now regard Keynes's analysis as seriously flawed, it is surprising that I enjoyed the course so much. As a student, I appreciated the simple way that the Keynesian model explained the workings and failings of the overall economy. Especially appealing were the clever policy remedies, such as increased government spending and tax cuts, that Keynes recommended to combat unemployment. Too bad that I discovered later that the model was theoretically and empirically deficient!
Robert Barro
The main form of crude communism is based upon emotional antipathy towards private property, and asserts that all men should be reduced to a similar level, so that everyone has an equal share of property. This is not genuine communism, Marx asserts, since it rests upon the same sort of distorted objectification of labor as is found in the theory of political economy. Crude communism of this sort becomes impelled towards a primitive asceticism, in which the community has become the capitalist instead of the individual. In crude communism, the rule of property is still dominant, but negatively: "Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way.”.
Anthony Giddens
