The Economic Way of Thinking 13th Edition by David Prychitko, Peter Boettke, Paul Heyne

Exercise 19

Unemployment did not exist by definition in the old Soviet Union, where any unemployment at all was held to be inconsistent with socialism. It was not just a matter of definition, however. There were so many jobs relative to workers that Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, urged the passage of laws that would prohibit job quitting without adequate cause and would subject able-bodied workers to arrest if they were out of work for more than two weeks. How do you suppose the Soviet Union maintained a surplus of jobs while the United States always seems to have had a surplus of workers?