On 10/9/13 11:28 AM, Robert Naiman wrote: > "Who cares if the unemployment rate drops to 4 percent"? > > All progressive economists should care if the unemployment rate drops to > 4%. There is no jobs program, no conversion program, no training program > like a 4% unemployment rate. If the national unemployment rate were 4%, > the unemployment rate for black teens would not be 50%. Low unemployment > is massively good for the working class. >
Well, I am not a "progressive economist". I am a Marxist and share the outlook of the New Statesman article's author. In the 1890s, Western European countries were all rapidly industrializing as was the United States. Nobody had a problem getting a job in a coal mine or a steel mill. But without a union, the wages were only barely enough to keep a family alive. Karl Marx developed his ideas in a period of low unemployment. His basic insight was that although wealth was produced by the working class, it was the ruling class that had power over how it was used. Basically you represent the kind of paternalism that bourgeois liberalism has perfected over the past 150 years, cock-sure of the need for enlightened class rule symbolized by FDR. The liberal establishment held out hopes that Obama could be the new FDR when he turned out to be the new Herbert Hoover. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
