Now is the time for action. Now is the time to impose a law regulating the number of hours per week that a person may legally work. This is our opportunity to practically eliminate unemployment by matching, dynamically, our desire to consume with our capability to produce. This is supply/demand brought to its logical terminus.

Ummmm...How exactly would you be able to enforce such a law, what would constitute work, what would the penalties be and exactly how would it be applied, particularly for salaried individuals? Would teachers be legally obligated to stop grading exams and lesson planning at home once they'd reached 40 hrs and barred from coming into work the next day lest they be hit with a sizable fine or be imprisoned for crimes against the Republic? Do CEOs get to count flight time between their corporate office and their "conference" in Barbados as time worked? Do firefighters have to drop the hose and high tail it out of the forest fire when they reach the mark? If a surgery goes longer than expected, does the surgeon have to leave the job half done? What about the guy working two minimum wage jobs?

I recall a case a few years ago where Walmart store worked around overtime and providing benefits to full time workers by having part timers punch out early. How do you prevent more of that type of pro bono work from taking place when you cap work hours? How do you keep under the table work and compensation from spiking? What about the incentive this provides to hire illegal labor. Because it's already illegal, their's no additional consideration for the weekly hour limit.

How would you set up, oh say, the Catholic Church, or capitalism, or start a new country? I think what I suggest is a less daunting task.

It is already illegal to pay less than the minimum wage for most jobs. Making it illegal for all jobs is a small (but in any case, positive) step. Thus, any unpaid or underpaid labor would be immediately illegal. Since I suggested a weekly limit, it exceeds the time any firefighter would spend actively fighting a fire, or any pilot would spend on a single flight, or any surgeon would spend continuously performing a surgery. That makes your protests in this area a non-issue, I'm afraid.

"Do CEOs get to count flight time between their corporate office and their "conference" in Barbados as time worked?" Yes! Maybe they could adjust to using the telephone if the inconvenience of "work travel" became too unendurable. I would have no problem with that.

"What about the guy working two minimum wage jobs?" With the minimum wage set high enough and a tax structure which bookends it by limiting the maximum wage, nobody would need to work two jobs.

"Would teachers be legally obligated to stop grading exams and lesson planning at home ..." Yes, of course. Why do you think compelling people to work for free should be institutionalized?

Rome collapsed because, when they were on an unsupportable path, they stuck to it. They could have become more insular, withdrawn from foreign adventures of conquest, and survived. We are also on an unsupportable path and I would hate to see us not change it for lack of creativity.

As Tom Hagen told Sal Tessio.

Those cut from 40 hours to 30 would get a 25% paycut; plus their employers would pay for about 25% more medical insurance plan members, which is around 8% of wage-costs. Many are at minimum hourly wage, where they desire more hours.

The labor force wouldn't stand for it. Nor the cos.

And "capability to produce" is now the asset of Xiao Ricenoodle. USA's biggest products are burgers, medicines, diapers, and porn. Thank G-d they are global in our favor, Healthcare at 17% of GDP means USA lags other countries in products as a % of GDP. And the measure is strictly in dollars, where $1 of Chinese GDP is five times $1 in American product. Thanks to Seymour Melman, Drucker, Carter, Clinton, Bushes, Greenspan, and Rubin -- USA produces bupkes and has lost the mfg capability,

Plus the hamburgers produced here are infected and hormoned.

We could accomplish the same thing by banning women, or men for that manner from the work place. We'd just have to support unmarried women, or men with taxpayer money.

Well, I keep hearing that we are first in exports. I'm a little uncertain whether Japan or Germany is second. I think China comes next. Don't explode yet! I know that these comparisons are all made using official rates of exchange so that China is probably, realistically, already in the lead. However, we always have the opportunity to turn inward. We keep pointing out that China needs to increase internal consumption of their products. However, for different reasons, so do we.

"The labor force wouldn't stand for it. Nor the cos."

Arguably, 20% of the domestic work force is unemployed so, including their vote means they are much more likely to stand for it. Besides, those who are working know that their power to improve their condition is nil when there are so many replacements eager to have their jobs - and with poorer pay. What will benefit the country, now and in the future, is to keep labor at a premium by keeping it in short supply. I don't know any better way of doing it than by limiting work hours.

Well, a good, old-fashioned pandemic, like the Medieval Black Death, might do that. The Black Death killed somewhere between 35 to 45% of the European population in the years 1347-1351. In the aftermath, labor was rather scarce, and real wages rose as a consequence.

Are you hoping for a particularly vicious swine flu pandemic?

I said what I meant and you read what I meant. A maximum work week is no harder to legislate and enforce than a minimum wage. In both cases, enforcement would rely on whistleblowers, not just on government scrutiny. It is, besides being a feasible move, a necessary move.

Black Plague would not really be as effective since it removes consumers from the system at about the same rate it removes producers. Even a stupidity epidemic would be more effective than a killing disease. You, in fact, have indicated that a stupidity epidemic is already underway.

Phil: Black Plague would not really be as effective since it removes consumers from the system at about the same rate it removes producers.

LeRoy: What the Black Death did was to dramatically raise the capital-to-labor ratio, usually denoted as the K/L ratio in economic theories. That was how it resulted in an equally dramatic increase in real wages, not by altering the consumer/producer ratio---higher K/L ratios are always associated (historically) with higher real wages. This was also true of 19th century America, which was land-abundant and labor-scarce, and thereby had unusually high real wages....as compared with almost all European countries of the same era.

As you yourself have often noted, we simply have too many people. What would be especially advantageous is if we could somehow arrange an epidemic that would preferentially kill off stupid people. If the swine flu was more virulent, with a higher mortality rate, it might do that, as there are many stupid people who are refusing to be vaccinated. There could be a lot of Darwin Awards handed out.

That suggests that setting a low allowable workweek would be salutory. Maybe there would be enough hourly increase to leave weekly incomes unchanged.

On the other hand, I think that rapidly increasing automation would alter the effect of K/L quite a bit from what occured in the times of mostly manual labor. The China effect of course disrupts the model further.