I never saw a union here suggesting: "OK, if we cannot get more salary mass, then cut individual salaries, but employ the unemployed".

The unemployment persists under leftist governments because they accept a neolibierlad dogma about the necessity of unemployment. For a state, there is no lack of fiat money, nor can there be a lack fiat money other then by political rules. So there is no need to either lower salaries in order to be able to employ.

If the recently hired does not delivered goods and services in proportion to what they are awarded by their new salary you get some inflation. But compared to the resource scarcity inflation it should be small change.

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So the only way you can reduce total wages if productivity is increasing is to reduce hours worked. And since productivity increases mainly due to capital accumulation and gains from scale, this will tend to reduce productivity gains, and thus reduce the gain in free time compared to the possible gain in goods produced. And raw material shortages happen to "someone else." Usually - not always, but usually - someone who has no name and has no face and lives in some far-off place.

Is it possible? Yes. But politically very difficult.

And we have low-hanging fruit from efficiency gains that we can harvest before we need to make genuinely difficult decisions.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.