II. Technical Requirements

Maintaining high-level production and employment is widely recognized today as a desirable objective of government policy. Those who oppose the government's accepting express responsibility for the achievement of this objective insist that government in a free-enterprise economy is not equipped to live up to such a responsibility. Criticism comes from two sides. Protagonists of a laissez-faire economy fear that a government pledged to assure full employment will be driven into more and more planning and regimentation. Protagonists of a planned economy, on the other hand, insist that any attempt to solve the problem of full employment within the framework of free enterprise will be futile. They fear that such an effort will only delay the transition to a planned economy, which they believe is the only final solution of our economic and social problems. Both kinds of critics maintain that the technical requirements of a policy designed to maintain full employment are incompatible with a free-enterprise economy.What, then, are the technical requirements of a policy of full employment? Is the government equipped, or can it be equipped, to do the job without paying the price of adopting a regimented economy? Perhaps those who speak of full employment in a free-enterprise economy are driven into the same dilemma in which the oldster found himself when telling his grandchild about the alligator chasing the frog. The frog jumped from the log into the river, swam through the river, hopped on land—the alligator coming closer and closer. When the alligator finally cornered the frog under a tree and opened his mouth to swallow him, things were getting desperate for both frog and story-teller. The old man knew only one solution: “The frog looked up and Baw the tree and just as the ‘gator's jaws were closing down, the frog flew up into the tree.” “But Grandpa,” said the little boy, “frogs can't fly.” “‘Deed they cain't, Son, ‘deed they cain't,” was the answer, “but this frog flew … he had to.”