Because wages are forced up in some sheltered industry, it does not follow that that industry will be the one to experience unemployment; the prejudicial consequences may affect other industries.#Quoted in W.H. Hutt, The Theory of Idle Resources (1939)
To augment the quantity of displacement (of labour) is not to augment the quantity of lengthy unemployment, for the very forces which create the additional displacements induce the re-absorbtion of the labour displaced.#Quoted in W.H. Hutt, The Theory of Idle Resources (1939)
To the extent that any trade is known to be risky from the point of view of continuity of employment, so must an increment to compensate the workers for such idleness as is liable to be experienced be reckoned as forming part of the remuneration.#
Improved institutions which reduced the delays of labour transference . . . would undoubtedly cheapen labour.#
If the standards of living which earnings can command from [casual labor] are deplorably low, it is the causes of the cheapness of the labour and not the methods by which it mays to utilize it which must be blamed. And the labour is cheap because other opportunities of employment are barred to those who provide it.#
The cause of unemployment in this case [of vagrancy] is a preference. It implies no wrong use of resources, given the social will. If it is a condition which we happen to deplore on moral grounds, then the method of reform lies either in changing the preferences directly (through preaching or teaching) or in changing the environment which apparently gives rise to the despised preferences.#
Their objection as wage-earners to downward wage-rate adjustments seems to be much more serious than their anger as consumers to price increases.#
In relation to the individual’s own ‘real welfare’ and that of his family, is it not clear that his attitude towards his income-status (or whatever else happens to be the cause of his indifference to ‘real’ wage-rates) must be a relatively negligible factor?#
Regrettable idleness, like other forms of ‘waste’, seems to be the product of arrangements which allow private interest to triumph over social interest. It arises, in other words, because our laws permit competition to be restricted. Hence, no improvement of the monetary system alone is capable of eliminating causes of idleness whilst other existing institutions remain.#