ABSTRACT
The more conventional “no free lunch” (NFL) paradigm is held by most mainstream, traditional economists in the United States (US), from Milton Friedman to Lester Thurow. The US entered the war with greatly underutilized resources—both capital and labor—and huge amounts of surplus agricultural products, a result of the stockpiling activities of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The NFL approach is employment-saving rather than employment-creating. The chapter examines the atypical employment-saving developments and hypothesize as to the reasons for the changes which seem to be at cross-purposes with the FL economy and its nonprogressive employment-creating laws of motion. Faced with massive unemployment, the new FL approach was necessarily employment-creating rather than employment-saving. Full employment was also ostensibly an early characteristic of the noncapitalist system of the USSR. This developed through planned investment which began with the First Five-Year Plan. In the US increased defense expenditures and greater investment occurred almost simultaneously during the Kennedy Johnson administration.
