> Second, I did, tentatively, endorse something like a living social
> wage, which also has problems, instead of full employment.
What do you mean by a living social wage?
> Seems to me to be better, not least because full employment only
> benefits those that can actually work.
Whereas your alternative - unemployment - benefits whom?
> Mike and SA say that full employment means more freedom from the boss,
> which seems ridiculous even beyond the surface level objection that
> work-is-freedom is a nonsense statement.
We're operating at an amazingly low level of argument here. You do realize that work has to be done in order to produce the stuff we need to live. Right? So work is a given. Your alternative to full employment, whatever it is, doesn't include the abolition of work. The choice is between work under conditions of mass unemployment - the discipline of the sack, as Kalecki put it - or work under conditions of full employment, with that discipline drastically curtailed.
> The full employment argument assumes that once it is achieved, then
> the next stage of socialist development can begin. It's never worked
> this way.
You mean full employment has never produced a socialist revolution? What has? This is the argument?
By the way - the unemployment rate in France in 1968: 1.8%. You think that's a coincidence?
> In fact, the segment of the population that has the best conditions,
> that has the closest thing to full employment--white males--is also
> the most reactionary, nasty, vindictive, and punitive.
So, better to keep everyone else immiserated in a state of unemployment - that way they won't be reactionary. You're not helping your case.
SA