[I am redistributing this message because many of you were not able to read it. HB]
I would add to James Ahiakpor's comments on the question of a full
employment assumption by Ricardo and other Classical School theorists my
scepticism that "full employment" is capable of any definition that does not
include institutional assumptions. The Law of Comparative Advantage--the
more general version of which Ludwig von Mises termed "The Law of
Association"--assumes only willing traders with unequal capabilities in
production. It doesn't assume that either one of them commits to either a
one-hour day or a 24-hour day of labor. That also applies to the
"full-time" employment of any of their higher-order goods. Those
assumptions would seem to be part of the institutional context within which
the theory would be applied to the actual market process.
Samuel Bostaph