Hutt's Crushing Blow to Keynes - Hunter Lewis - Mises Daily

Hutt's Crushing Blow to Keynes - Hunter Lewis - Mises Daily: "the real source of unemployment is some disturbance in the price-and-profit system. Government cannot possibly help matters by intervening in ways that further distort and disturb that system."

"To grow, an economy must change. To change, assets and workers must be shifted from where they are less needed (less productive) to where they are more needed (more productive). These shifts will inevitably produce temporary unemployment. If there had never been unemployment, and thus no economic change, we would all still be living in caves, and there would be far fewer of us, because hunting and gathering would only support a small fraction of the present population."

"Is it more productive for a highly trained but unemployed engineer to bag groceries for pay or to invest time without pay in looking for an engineering job? If he or she took the grocery-bagging job, Keynes would presumably be satisfied; we would be closer to full employment. But the economy would clearly not be more productive, which it must be to create new jobs. We should also keep in mind that an employment-agency employee job searching for the engineer would be considered gainfully 'employed,' while the engineer doing the same work would still be 'unemployed.'"

"For the period 2002–2008, out-of-control Federal Reserve money printing and a host of other government policies and programs blew up the bubble. Millions of people not especially suited for construction were pulled into this sector and put to work building homes that, in the end, no one wanted. When the bubble burst, even the most highly trained construction workers suddenly found themselves unable to get any construction work at all."

"higher wages earned by unions actually come out of the pockets of other workers, not out of employers' profits, a point that is now well established but still little understood. This is true, in simple terms, because high wages reduce employment in unionized sectors, thereby increase labor supply in other sectors, which increased supply reduces nonunionized labor rates. In addition, workers are also consumers and may have to pay more for unionized-sector goods."

"free markets, without aiming for equal outcomes, produce both more equal opportunity and more equal outcomes than any other system."