Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Friday, November 15, 2013

Capitalism and Unemployment

By Richard D Wolff

Truthout | News Analysis - Friday, 15 November 2013

Capitalism as a system seems incapable of solving its unemployment problem. It keeps generating long-term joblessness, punctuated by spikes of recurring short-term extreme joblessness. The system's leaders cannot solve or overcome the problem. Before the latest capitalist crisis hit in 2007, the unemployment rate was near 5 percent. In 2013, it is near 7.5 percent. That is 50 percent higher despite the last six years of so-called "effective policies to address unemployment."
Capitalism makes employment depend chiefly on capitalists' decisions to undertake production, and those decisions depend on profits. If capitalists expect profits high enough to satisfy them, they hire. If capitalists don't, we get unemployment. Capitalism requires the unemployed, their families and their communities to live with firing decisions made by capitalists even though they are excluded from participating in those decisions. The United States revolted against Britain partly because it rejected being victimized by tax decisions from which it was excluded. Yet employment decisions are at least as important as tax decisions.

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