Full Employment In A Free Society [antikvár]

PREFACEThe work presented here as a Report on Full Employment in a Free Society is a sequel to the Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services which I made to His Majesty's Government in November, 1942. In that Report I named three assumptions of the Plan for Social Security proposed in it, namely a system of children's allowances, a comprehensive health and rehabilitation service, and maintenance of employment. If Social Security is defined as security for the individual, organized by the State, against risks to which the individual will remain exposed even when the condition of the society as a whole is as good as it can be made, both children's allowances and medical treatment are parts of Social Security. Both of these assumptions were dealt with to some extent in my Report, and proposals were made for realizing them. The third assumption, of maintenance of employment and prevention of mass unemployment, was not dealt with there, and no proposals as to how it could be realized were made. Measures to maintain employment are not part of Social Security as defined above; they are measures of general application to make the economic condition of society as a whole healthy. I now complete, so far as I can, the work which I began with my earlier Report.That earlier Report was prepared by me, at the request of His Majesty's Government, as Chairman of an Inter-Departmental Committee, on which all the other representatives were civil servants. Some seven months after the Committee had been appointed, it was decided by the Government that, in view of the issues of high policy which would arise, the departmental representatives should henceforth be regarded as my advisers and assessors, and that the Report when made should be my Report, signed by me alone, so that the departmental representatives would not be associated in any way with the views and recommendations on questions of policy which it might contain. No one else, therefore, had or has any responsibility for what I said in that Report. At the same time it could not possibly have been made by me, except with the help of the departmental representatives, and without having at my disposal the whole resources of the Government for investigation and consultation. In the Report itself, I expressed my debt to the departmental representatives as strongly as I could, without appearing to associate them