Capitalism's profit-driven automation and its recurrent business cycles often yielded more workers than there were available jobs. Especially when prolonged and large, unemployment generated suffering, anger and eventually rebellion. Capitalism's automation and instability, separately or combined, always risked provoking threats to its survival. To limit such threats by easing the suffering, capitalism developed various modes of charity and welfare for the unemployed. Welfare systems are not external intrusions upon, but rather self-protective outgrowths of, and within, capitalism's actual functioning. Full employment has been extremely rare in capitalism's history; unemployment was and is the norm. Debates over how much and whose wealth will be diverted to support the unemployed via welfare systems have always agitated capitalism. However, to imagine a pure capitalism without one or another kind of welfare is delusion.
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