Deficits Being a Welcome Means to Full Employment

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“I am less worried about the budget deficits than by the need for the state to create jobs where private industry fails”.

Bruno Kreisky, expressing the view of a true social democrat.

The above quote is from a lengthy but recommendable analysis by Bill Mitchell of how social democracy disappeared in the 1980s to become the maid of neoliberalism: The Abdication of the Left ...

Being a supporter of capitalism for pragmatic rather than romantic reasons, I would prefer an alleviated formulation replacing "where private industry fails" by "where this does not fall into the purview of private industry". 

Private enterprise creates a lot of employment enabling enormous productivity and wealth. But private enterprise is not the sovereign producer of the demand that is required to make it thrive. Macroeconomic demand is subject to factors that are not under the control of private enterprise and can be addressed more effectively by government and economic policy.

This is what neoliberals do not understand, for which reason they inadvertently support economic policies that cannot sustain full employment of all available resources, human and others. Arguably, there may be a trend among neoliberal partisans, especially among industry leaders, to (consciously) prefer the discipline of unemployment (creating an industrial reserve army and docile workers) to a business environment at its zenith which puts labour in a powerful position.