David Brancaccio

It's not a bug.

It's weirdly a feature.

It's like the standard math of economics in our market system insists that unlike eating Reese's peanut butter cups, there can be too much employment.

Businesses and regular economists get nervous if, what, too many of us have jobs?

We just had this big natural experiment in some of this when we were coming out of the COVID pandemic.

The unemployment rate got really low and employees or potential employees could say, hey, you want to hire me?

You got to pay me more.

The way we reported this was that that sparked a lot of destructive inflation.

You're saying what?

If you have to pay employees more because a lot of people are employed, why couldn't that come out of shareholder profits, not necessarily putting it into prices?

Let's talk about the world we live in now in the United States.

It isn't really these technocrats who are in full power.

The current powers that be are led by President Trump, who's working very hard to stop immigration.

That lowers the ranks of the unemployed and does, in fact, do what I think you want to have happen, which is, in part, a move to raise compensation in America.

The new book is called Escape from Capitalism and Intervention.

Economics professor Clara Maté is also founder of a grassroots organization called Forum for Real Economic Emancipation, or FREE.

Professor, thank you.

And this old house radio hour and Marketplace here work together on a one-hour special called Building Tomorrow, where we explore what a house for the next hundred years might look like, given disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and more, given the affordability crisis in housing, given our evolving needs for how we want to live.

There's another chance to catch this program this weekend.

We're putting it in the Marketplace Morning Report podcast feed.