Quotes About Full Employment

“Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults-its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

— Robert B. Reich

“It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.”

— Robert B. Reich

“Abolition is not some disstant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming health care, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after.”

— Eric A. Stanley

“As long as there are no routes back to full employment except that of somehow restoring business confidence, he pointed out, business lobbies in effect have veto power over government actions: propose doing anything they dislike, such as raising taxes or enhancing workers' bargaining power, and they can issue dire warnings that this will reduce confidence and plunge the nation into depression. But let monetary and fiscal policy be deployed to fight unemployment, and suddenly business confidence becomes less necessary, and the need to cater to capitalists' concern is much reduced.”

— Paul Krugman

“Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.”

— Harriet Martineau

“We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. ("The Thing")”

— Richard Matheson

“Thus, after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway;
the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed.”

— John Maynard Keynes

“If shackling former prisoners with a lifetime of debt and authorizing discrimination against them in employment, housing, education, and public benefits is not enough to send the message that they are not wanted and not even considered full citizens, then stripping voting rights from those labeled criminals surely gets the point across.”

— Michelle Alexander

“I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas-”

— Bill Bryson

“Only a small rich fringe hates Social Security for disincentivizing 80-year-olds from seeking full-time employment.”

— Alex Pareene

“I'm willing to fight for Social Security, Medicare, student loans, U.S. jobs, equal pay, progressive taxation and full employment.”

— Alan Grayson

“The job numbers are positive. We've had more jobs created now than were lost during the recession. We're seeing that the creation, we're seeing those numbers not only grow but shift toward the private sector and shift toward full-time employment and these are all signs that the recovery is taking some hold but we're not out of woods.”

— Stephen Harper

“As Prime Minister between 1979 and 1990 I had the opportunity to put these convictions into effect in economic policy -
We intended policy in the 1980s to be directed towards fundamentally different goals from those of most of the post-war ear. We believed that since jobs (in a free society) did not depend on government but upon satisfying customers, there was no point in setting targets for 'full' employment. Instead, government should create the right framework of sound money, low taxes, light regulation and flexible markets (including labour markets) to allow prosperity and employment to grow.”

— Margaret Thatcher

“Full employment-very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment-is characteristic of precisely the nations that are most retarded industrially.”

— Henry Hazlitt

“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”

— Henry Hazlitt

“The best prices are not the highest prices, but the prices that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls. The best profits, from the standpoint not only of industry but of labor, are not the lowest profits, but the profits that encourage most people to become employers or to provide more employment than before.”

— Henry Hazlitt

“Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention? Certainly not. Do policy makers have the knowledge and ability to improve macroeconomic outcomes rather than make matters worse? Yes.”

— Janet Yellen

“We need love, and to ensure love, we need to have full employment, and we need social justice. We need gender equity. We need freedom from hunger. These are our most fundamental needs as social creatures.”

— David Suzuki

“All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up.”

— David Eddings

“Comics creators are generally screwed in life: Most of us who are fortunate enough to do comics full time - which is very few of us - will literally draw until we die because we have no employment structures intact for retirement, much less insurance!”

— Nate Powell

“There is no reason inherent in the real resources available to us why we cannot move rapidly within the next two or three years to a state of genuine full employment.”

— William Vickrey

“I define genuine full employment as a situation where there are at least as many job openings as there are persons seeking employment, probably calling for a rate of unemployment, as currently measured, of between 1 and 2 percent.”

— William Vickrey

“For he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more,”

— Louisa May Alcott

“If borrowing and spending all this money led to more jobs than we would be at full employment already.”

— Paul Ryan

“The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Full employment is a socially hazardous goal. In effect, it aspires to restore through political expedients the pre-industrial state of toil that science, engineering, technology and modern management are pledged to overcome.”

— Louis O. Kelso

“Giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the "emergency full employment" bills proposed.”

— Jack Kemp

“We cannot hope to achieve full employment and sustain it until we have mastered inflation.”

— Denis Healey

“The full employment situation reinforces itself.”

— Jared Bernstein

“Kalecki thus precisely predicted the economic and political U-turn that occurred with the advent of neoliberalism. Kalecki also argued that fundamental institutional changes, especially regarding wage-setting and other aspects of the employment relationship, would be essential if full employment was to be sustained.”

— Jim Stanford

“Whoever will cultivate their own mind will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing as exotic fruits and flowers; the vices and passions (which I am afraid are the natural product of the soil) demand perpetual weeding. Add to this the search after knowledge ... and the longest life is too short.”

— Mary Wortley Montagu

“Two-point-seven percent unemployment equates to
everybody who wants to work is working. It equates to full employment.”

— Betty Williams

“After the war people said, 'If you can plan for war, why can't you plan for peace?' When I was 17, I had a letter from the government saying, 'Dear Mr. Benn, will you turn up when you're 17 1/2? We'll give you free food, free clothes, free training, free accommodation, and two shillings, ten pence a day to just kill Germans.' People said, well, if you can have full employment to kill people, why in God's name couldn't you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses?”

— Tony Benn

“Full employment does not mean literally no unemployment; that is to say, it does not mean that every man and woman in the country who is fit and free for work is employed productively every day of his or her working life ... Full employment means that unemployment is reduced to short intervals of standing by, with the certainty that very soon one will be wanted in one's old job again or will be wanted in a new job that is within one's powers.”

— William Beveridge

“There is no inherent mechanism in our present system which can with certainty prevent competitive sectional bargaining for wages from setting up a vicious spiral of rising prices under full employment.”

— William Beveridge

“It may seem strange, but Congress has never developed a set of goals for guiding Federal Reserve policy. In founding the System, Congress spoke about the country's need for "an elastic currency." Since then, Congress has passed the Full Employment Act, declaring its general intention to promote "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." But it has never directly counseled the Federal Reserve.”

— Wright Patman

“I think the team that successfully puts together an economic and social policy framework for global full employment in decent working conditions based on local development, that would command the support of all stakeholders and all international organizations concerned, should be awarded the [Nobel] prize. I am sure they would get it not just for economics, but also for peace in the world.”

— Juan Somavia

“Capital, and the question of who owns it and therefore reaps the benefit of its productiveness, is an extremely important issue that is complementary to the issue of full employment ... I see these as twin pillars of our economy: Full employment of our labor resources and widespread ownership of our capital resources. Such twin pillars would go a long way in providing a firm underlying support for future economic growth that would be equitably shared.”

— Hubert H. Humphrey

“Are deviations from full employment a social problem? Obviously.”

— Janet Yellen

“If you continue to use monetary policy to attempt to promote full employment the result would be that you would have higher inflation, and that you would not have lower unemployment.”

— Milton Friedman

“Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.”

— Joan Robinson

“We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don't think it's going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”

— Ben Bernanke

“It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.”

— John Maynard Keynes

“We are the only species on this planet without full employment.”

— Paul Hawken

“The 2013/14 storms & floods show the UK needs to invest in a climate resilient, low carbon, food secure, full employment, positive future”

— Phil Harding

“The idea that full employment without property ownership will solve the world's problems is utter nonsense. The Keynesian concept that the function of capital is merely to amplify labor, not independently produce wealth is simply blindness.”

— Louis O. Kelso

“There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“New technology is the true friend of full employment; the indispensable ally of progress; and the surest guarantee of prosperity.”

— Margaret Thatcher