Unemployment Quotes - page 14
The coming stock market crash will inevitably cause much unemployment. This will lead to a complete change of government priorities: the supplying of adequate food, shelter, health-care and education will become paramount responsibilities of all forward looking nations. The waste of resources as today, in armaments and competitive practices, will cease. A rational and sustainable economic structure based on sufficiency will become the norm. Leisure will be the natural by-product of such a structure. p.156.
Benjamin Creme
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Joseph Stalin
Science has made great progress in this world. Where we used to engage a thousand men to work, now a bulldozer does the work in seconds. But that makes a thousand people useless and unemployed. While unemployment is increasing in the world, people have lost their peace of mind. The reason for this is because man has ceased to work. Due to this inaction, all kind of pains and sicknesses are increasing in the world. I want you to take the energy of the machines into yourself and work like machines!
Haidakhan Babaji
Unemployment, of course, sends the economy into a recession, creating more unemployment. Ironically, unemployment hurts women more than men. Feminists argue that's because of sex discrimination: women are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Correct on the outcome; wrong on the reason. We hire first what we need most, and we fire first what we need least. That's why you hire the garbage collector first, and fire him last. Men may be hired first and fired last because more men are willing to do society's dirty work and hazardous work for a lower price.
Warren Farrell
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In later years I was to find economists and newspaper editors arguing against the principle of full employment, to which after the Second War all political parties attached so much importance. While I recognise the dangers of "over-employment", I have little sympathy with those who, writing from pleasant suburban retreats or comfortable editorial chairs, dilate upon the disciplinary values of pre-war conditions. It was my fate to live with the problems of heavy unemployment for fifteen years. They were not substantially eased by any conscious effort either in the industrial or economic field. Rearmament under Hitler's pressure and ultimately under war brought their own grim solution.
Harold Macmillan
[W]e have asked the workers...to give the biggest possible output they can so that we may have a margin for export trade over the world which, when sold, will purchase us food and raw materials to keep our industry going. Now what does this term "keep industry going" mean? It is the difference between employment and unemployment... We depend on transport, shipping, and the movement of goods to keep up this output. Therefore, this strike is not a strike against capitalists or employers. It is a strike against your mates; a strike against the housewife; a strike against the ordinary common people who have difficulties enough now to manage on their shilling's worth of meat and the other rationed commodities.
Clement Attlee
Milton Friedman was not surprised. In 1968, in one of the decisive intellectual achievements of postwar economics, Friedman not only showed why the apparent tradeoff embodied in the idea of the Phillips curve was wrong; he also predicted the emergence of combined inflation and high unemployment, which Paul Samuelson dubbed "stagflation."
Paul Krugman
Before they [Labour] came in unemployment was gradually improving year by year. Since they have been in it has gone up. Before they came in the cost of living was going down. It has gone up. Since they came in the number of houses that had been built for the workmen had gone down and their cost gone up. Before they came in the export trade of this country was gradually but steadily improving. Have you seen the last returns? They are going down. If this is what Mr. Ramsay MacDonald means by a Labour success, Heaven save this country any more Socialist triumphs.
David Lloyd George
...to me, at least, this unemployment problem is the most crucial problem of our country. I regard it as such. I can fight it. I am willing to fight it. I cannot fight it without weapons. I have for myself come to the conclusion that-owing to the conditions that exist to-day in the world, having regard to the economic environment, having regard to the situation of our country-if we go on pottering along as we are we shall have grave unemployment with us to the end of time. And I have come to the conclusion myself that the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market. (Loud and continued cheering.)
Stanley Baldwin
The idea that a lax administration of the Poor Law is Socialistic, that putting an unemployed man on a farm for six weeks at the public expense is Socialistic, that feeding school children is the beginning of the Socialistic State, is absurd. We can deal with our unemployed, our sweated workers, our derelicts, only by attacking the causes of unemployment, of sweating, of human deterioration and though at a crisis our humanitarianism will compel us to resort to palliatives and give temporary relief, our action at such times should not be a willing and proud thing but one which is hesitating and temporary.
Ramsay MacDonald
For some, the benign inflation outcome of 1996 might be considered surprising, as resource utilization rates--particularly of labor--were in the neighborhood of those that historically have been associated with building inflation pressures. To be sure, an acceleration in nominal labor compensation, especially its wage component, became evident over the past year. But the rate of pay increase still was markedly less than historical relationships with labor market conditions would have predicted. Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff.
Alan Greenspan
I came to the U.S. in 2006, having lived in the Netherlands since 1992. Like most immigrants, I came with a confidence that in America I would be judged on my merits rather than on the basis of racial or sexual prejudice. There's a reason the U.S. remains, as it has long been, the destination of choice for would-be migrants. We know that there is almost no difference in the unemployment rate for foreign-born and native-born workers-unlike in the European Union.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all payroll taxes - including those for social security and unemployment compensation - and the replacement of that revenue in the form of pollution taxes - principally on CO2. The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more pollution.
Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an "externality." This absurd label means, in essence: we don't need to keep track of this stuff so let's pretend it doesn't exist.
And sure enough, when it's not recognized in the marketplace, it does make it much easier for government, business, and all the rest of us to pretend that it doesn't exist. But what we're pretending doesn't exist is the stuff that is destroying the habitability of the planet.
Al Gore
