why a healthy economy cannot exhibit total employment

unemployment through developments in efficiency frees up individuals to take on new previously impossible jobs. Thus the economy expands as a robot takes over what was previously manual labour for ten men. Now those ten men are available for jobs that previously could not have existed due to the workforce being occupied in manual labour. in other words, prior to the robot there was no supply of labour available to fulfill a demand. following the introduction of the robot, the manual labour is still getting done, now by the robot, but now there are also ten extra jobs made possible by the newly increased supply of labour. everyone’s real wealth increases.

The corollary is the traditional socialist position. 19th century Fabians were concerned with full employment and were opposed to technological development and industrial progress as it ‘threatened’ the full employment of their trade union clients. Thus their conception of economics could not permit expansion as it was based in stasis. Everyone had to have a job and no job could be automated or removed through efficiencies. Thus there were never any excess workers available to make new jobs, services and products possible. The fabians must have realised this as I believe it was the basis of their eugenicist focus on population growth. Like other collectivists awarding medals for mothers who added their burgeoning offspring to the peoples’ workforce, the fabians needed population growth to provide the extra workers required for economic growth. Their social policies were opposed to the capitalist mechanism of doing more with less and so their economic policies became dependent upon ever increasing birthrates.

This of course was to be achieved through tax funded incentives and subsidies (todays ‘nudges’). Obviously they completely missed the Misesian observation that you cannot tax an economy into growth