> Yes. Can't beat the short essay, Political Aspects of Full Employment. Why
> you can't have it under capitalism.
I agree that it's a great essay but it has some problems, especially if it's taken as a prophecy of Milton Friedman. He argues that the contradictions of full employment are not economic but only political: that profits will be greater under full employment and over-productivity wage inflation will only harm rentiers. Actually he's inconsistent about the inflation question, arguing first that it will only be a problem if demand is raised to a level above that consistent with full employment, then admitting that the strengthened bargaining power of workers could spark inflation at full employment.
In this tension he anticipates inflation theory of the 1950s and 1960s, when full employment stopped being seen as a knife-edge line with unemployment on one side and inflation on the other, and became a grey area in which they could occur together. The rise of the Phillips curve was a theoretical reflection of this.
In the end full employment turned out to be _economically_ impossible and not only politically distasteful for capital. It's relationship with inflation was the key reason (which is not to say this relationship is stable - it has clearly shifted around over the decades for various reasons). Especially under the fixed exchange rates of Bretton Woods, inflation was not a problem for rentiers alone because it was associated with loss of competitiveness, a higher propensity to import, and ultimately balance-of-payments problems. Kalecki misses this because he thinks in terms of a closed economy. The US experience was a little different from much of the world here because of the special position of its dollar, but by the 1970s inflation was an economic and not simply a political problem there too. Floating exchange rates changed the nature of the problem but did not remove it.
Mike Beggs