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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