Jobs and Trade Hans F. Sennholz Unemployment is the great puzzle of our time. It perplexes politicians, confuses officials, and even entangles economists. It persists and continues to grow despite all the government programs that mean to reduce it and the tax dollars spent to alleviate it. Some writers continue to echo the teaching of Karl Marx. Most economists are at one with John Maynard Keynes, the economic guru of our time, who viewed unemployment as a symptom of insufficient spending.
Politicians continue to cling to the Keynesian view because it supports their spending predilection.
Some old-guard politicians and writers explain unemployment in protectionist terms which are among the oldest and most controversial in economics. Unemployment, they blaze about, is the price we pay for our participation in a global economy with millions of unemployed and under-employed people who are willing to work for 25 cents an hour. If foreign trade actually were responsible for the corporate layoffs, the phenomenal rise of imports and exports in recent years should have disemployed most Americans. Surely, if imports would destroy jobs, this 7,800 percent rise in imports since 1950 should have thrown most Americans out of work. It is difficult to imagine our present working conditions and standards of living if the U.S. government had turned inward and closed its borders in 1950, as the Hoover Administration managed to perpetrate in 1930.