unemployment

81:6.32It is not enough to train men for work; in a com­plex so­ci­ety there must also be pro­vided ef­fi­cient meth­ods of place find­ing. Be­fore train­ing cit­i­zens in the highly spe­cial­ized tech­niques of earn­ing a liv­ing, they should be trained in one or more meth­ods of com­mon­place la­bor, trades or call­ings which could be uti­lized when they were tran­siently un­em­ployed in their spe­cial­ized work. No civ­i­liza­tion can sur­vive the long-time har­bor­ing of large classes of un­em­ployed. In time, even the best of cit­i­zens will be­come dis­torted and de­mor­al­ized by ac­cept­ing sup­port from the pub­lic trea­sury. Even pri­vate char­ity be­comes per­ni­cious when long ex­tended to able-bod­ied cit­i­zens.

72:5.11La­bor is be­com­ing more hon­or­able on this con­ti­nent, and all able-bod­ied cit­i­zens over eigh­teen work ei­ther at home and on farms, at some rec­og­nized in­dus­try, on the pub­lic works where the tem­porar­ily un­em­ployed are ab­sorbed, or else in the corps of com­pul­sory la­bor­ers in the mines.

81:6.21In the early days the only en­ergy ap­plied to land cul­ti­va­tion was man power. It was a long strug­gle to sub­sti­tute oxen for men since this threw men out of em­ploy­ment. Lat­terly, ma­chines have be­gun to dis­place men, and ev­ery such ad­vance is di­rectly con­trib­u­tory to the prog­ress of so­ci­ety be­cause it lib­er­ates man power for the ac­com­plish­ment of more valu­able tasks.

81:6.22Sci­ence, guided by wis­dom, may be­come man’s great so­cial lib­er­a­tor. A me­chan­i­cal age can prove dis­as­trous only to a na­tion whose in­tel­lec­tual level is too low to dis­cover those wise meth­ods and sound tech­niques for suc­cess­fully ad­just­ing to the tran­si­tion dif­fi­cul­ties aris­ing from the sud­den loss of em­ploy­ment by large num­bers con­se­quent upon the too rapid in­ven­tion of new types of labor­sav­ing ma­chin­ery.