Keynes's abiding legacy will be to have shown that the free market cannot guarantee long-run full employment, which therefore establishes a role for the state in the economic affairs of the nation. I particularly remember a lecture in 1933 when Keynes tried to convey how new ideas were born. Ideas were apt to be like fluffy balls of wool with no fixed outline, and the relationship between concepts when first perceived was likely to be equally woolly. Keynes mistrusted intellectual rigour as likely to get in the way of original thinking, and saw that it was not uncommon to hit on a valid conclusion before finding a logical path to it. I would rather be vaguely right, than precisely wrong.
Full employment is the hoariest phrase in our lexicon, the true mark of a Keynesian relic.
Full employment was an objective well suited to a world of unionised industrial workers, a time when fewer women worked, when there were no migrants to speak of and little competition from Third World manufactures. For this reason, full employment has largely lost its value as a political objective. The Left should stop recycling Keynesian employment policies, New Deal public works and welfare programs and the Civil Rights movements. As social forces these are spent, in some cases corrupted, and as economic programs they have been outflanked. As such, we have lost our moral standing, our voice.