Stoner - Member
If you ask Ernie, Junkyard or TJ, they'll say yes out of misguided socialist myopia and ignore the fact that with full employment might come rabid inflation and in order to achieve full employment you'd need massive state intervention to the point of oppression. q.v. Stalin, Hitler etc.
LOL ! This place is sooooh predictable !
Stalin and Hitler eh ? The two "20th Century Monsters" well that must mean that full employment is the work of the Devil.....it is indisputably evil ! Long live unemployment !
Of course no one mentions the name of the 1st Earl of Stockton and former Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, (AKA the Council House Builder) despite the fact that we are talking about full employment in the UK. Well it wouldn't do to talk of Stalin, Hitler, and Macmillan, now would it ?
Note also that only Stalin's name is ever used when describing full employment in the Soviet Union. Because whilst there was also full employment under Kruschev and Brezhnev, their names don't somehow quite conjure up the same level of "evilness" and therefore doesn't reinforce just how satanic full employment is.
And of course the small detail that Hitler didn't actually achieve full employment, is very conveniently ignored. Under the Third Reich only Aryan men were counted as unemployed, Jews, Gypsies, women, etc, were not counted as they had no right to work.
Under Hitler the amount of people looking for work did fall (although there were still a third of a million when Germany went to war) but this was in part because the unemployed were put to work on construction projects for which they received no wages - just food, a place in a work camp, and a little pocket money. So not actually employment as we know it then.
Hitler also drafted over one and a half million into the armed forces. So if we are going to use that criteria, then we also need to include Winston Churchill as someone who achieved full employment. Specially as again, it's more applicable to Britain. So maybe Hitler, Stalin and Churchill ? Or does that also rob full employment of its "satanic" connotations ?
But of course as we all know from Thatcher and Stoner, inflation is the greatest evil known to man.
Why ? ....... because it robs the idle rich of their unearned accumulative wealth ! And what causes inflation ? Well we all know that it's caused by ordinary working people having too much money to spend. It has nothing at all to do with money-grabbing profiteers pushing prices up !
And as Stoner so correctly identifies, what better way to stop ordinary working people having too much money to spend than to have high levels of unemployment. Unemployment keeps ordinary working people disciplined, and in the knowledge that they should be grateful for the little that they have. It is not for them to be greedy, that is a special right and privilege which is uniquely reserved for the wealthy.
Of course when the greed driven incompetence of the wealthy few eventually causes the shit to hit the fan, then ordinary working people will come to their rescue by tightening their belts even further, and of course accepting even higher levels of unemployment. Well you wouldn't want the wealthy and privileged to do that now would you, I mean, it's against "human nature" is it not ?
Besides, the wealthy and privileged of course control broadcasting, education, newspapers, etc, and can therefore do an excellent job of convincing most ordinary people, from cradle to grave, that it's all their fault.
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trailmonkey - Member
Given that our two main political parties are commited to economic liberalism and that the third party will just do whatever they are told, then no, zero unemployment will never be possible as it is not a political goal that a UK govt. will ever strive towards.
You're right trailmonkey, full employment is not a political goal which UK governments any longer strive for, but only because they have convinced most ordinary people of TINA. Quite an impressive achievement and not least, because of economic liberalism's catastrophic failures in recent times.
This wasn't of course always the case. Thatcher won the 1979 general election on a promise of abolishing mass unemployment. In fact, it was the central pillar of her entire election campaign. This being the election poster which was predominately used throughout the entire campaign :
Unemployment was "only" one and a half million during that election, but Thatcher only ever managed to push it up even further after she took power. She managed to get away with it for two reasons. Firstly, she convinced many people that it wasn't her fault, in exactly the same way as the present Tory government is doing so today.
And secondly, even with over 3 million unemployed it still means that the overwhelming majority of the electorate are employed. This leaves many people under the completely mistaken belief that unemployment doesn't affect them - it always does, whether it's because of lower wages, higher taxes, etc. In fact many people who still have jobs feel "lucky".........which is of course very good news for any government.
