Why makes some unemployment unavoidable?

Answer 1

There is a basic difference between a free market economy and a command economy. In the Soviet Union, the government owned everything and employed everybody, so there was no unemployment, however, productivity was terrible and the economy was terrible, which was one of the leading reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. You can put everybody to work if you really want to, but you cannot guarantee that this work will be productive. In the free market, we are all responsible for our own employment or unemployment. We have to get our own jobs, because the government is not going to just assign one to us, nor would we want them to; we value the freedom to make our own choices in life, about employment and many other matters. When we lose control, it generally turns out that faceless bureaucrats (or commissars) will not make the right choices for us. The random, unplanned nature of the economy means that it does not work well for everybody all the time. Nobody can be certain about the demand for a given profession in the future. Industries rise and fall, international competition can have unexpected effects, technological obsolescence wipes out whole professions. You may have trained to be a typesetter, but now there is no demand for typesetting because it is all done by desktop publishing instead. If you are flexible, you will look for other work, and possibly retrain. Not everyone is flexible. The free market, for all its chaos, still has a better record than command economies, but it can be very hard on some people.