There is an involuntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that no one chooses bad luck over good; there is also a voluntary element in all unemployment, in the sense that however miserable one's current work options, one can always choose to accept them"-Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (from Studies in Business-Cycle Theory).The cause of waves of unemployment is not "capitalism" but governments denying enterprise the right to produce good money.
Friedrich von Hayek (Nobel Laureate)
Friedrich von Hayek (Nobel Laureate)
False Dictum is this: involuntary (or Keynesian) unemployment is not a fact or a phenomenon which it is the task of theorists to explain. It is, on contrary, a theoretical construct which Keynes introduced in hope that it would be helpful in discovering a correct explanation for a genuine phenomenon: large-scale fluctuation in measured, total unemployment.
The worker who loses a good job in good times does not volunteer; he suffers a capital loss. Similarly, the firm which loses an experienced worker or staff in depressed times suffers an undesired capital loss. However, the unemployed worker at any time can always find some jobs at once, and so a firm always fills a vacancy instantaneously. Neither does so by choice; it is not difficult to understand given the quantity of the jobs and the employees that are easiest to find.
Thus, it does not appear possible, even in principle, to classify individual unemployed people as either voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed depending on the characteristics of the decision problem they face. We cannot, even theoretically, arrive at a usable definition of full employment as a state in which no involuntary unemployment exists.