Free Market Forces Will Create the Needed Jobs

Larry Summers (Director of the White House Economic Counsel) made his reputation as an employment theorist, he says: “I thought if you could have areas where there was long-term substantial unemployment, then that raises some questions about the functioning of the markets” Actually Summers saw in unemployment a chance to explore how markets don’t work - and thinks about policies that could correct for failures.
Converse in his view nowadays unemployment is structural, in other words it won’t be solved as easily is it was done before, which is entirely correct. However it further shows how unprepared the government is to tackling this problem.

Tangled in the debate of health care and bleeding political capital, the White House may find itself too weak and distracted to deal with the dangers of joblessness. But it cannot afford to wait the longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is to come back into the work force. As the Peterson Institute explains, “It is entirely possible that what started a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem.”

Those various statements show that no reliable approach has been developed, and certainly not a clear view is obtained to tackle a problem that could define the outcome of Obama’s presidency the way George W. Bush was caught by the 9/11 events. Still the papers are not gifted by a sound grasp of this problem, and only present the imperfect view of the government, without coming up with other alternatives:

"The free market is not up to the job of creating work."

"Only massive programs are equal to the challenge of restoring stable growth to our economy," says a headline and conclusion in The Financial Times.

It describes an "infrastructure bank." It also could have mentioned a war. WWII worked wonders for unemployment after Great Depression 1.0. Back then all of a sudden, anybody who wanted a job could find one.

An "infrastructure bank" is utterly nonsense and claptrap. The Soviet Union put everyone to work. Meanwhile it is known where that got them. It's not the fact that people are sweating on a job site that makes a society prosper; they also have to do things that add to their wealth. Infrastructure, like any other capital investment, makes sense only when it pays off. The Japanese poured more concrete per square meter than anyone before or since. They proved that all the bridges and canals that were constructed and digged still wouldn’t restart the economy.

Of course, they look at the facts and come to the wrong conclusion.

Zuckerman, editor of US News & World Report, provides the unemployment details: “Of people who are out of work, more have been jobless for longer than at any time since 1948. More exhaust their unemployment benefits before finding a new job than ever before. And if they are lucky enough to find work, they'll work the shortest workweeks since 1951.”

In other words, the baby boomers have never seen times so rough, for themselves as well as for their children. “One American in nine depends on the government for his daily bread. There are 6.2 million more people on food stamps than when the recession began. And there are 6 people waiting in line for each job opening, up from 1.7 when the recession started.”

The baby boomers meanwhile figure they will have to keep working longer than expected. “Sixty-three percent of them say they expect to delay retirement in order to build up more retirement savings.”
This is bad news for younger workers, who were hoping the boomers would get out of the way to free up some jobs. Among young Americans, unemployment hasn't been so high since 1945.

The free market is the only force that can create valuable work. Because the free market knows perfectly, by sales and earnings, which projects make sense to be taken-on.

Apparently the public prefers soothing lies, instead of learning the consequences of the honest truth and subsequently is fighting a losing battle.

To complete this essay, I just read a very true comment from djermano on my previous essay:

“Jobs can not be created without trust. The only thing that Americans trust it seems is the Military...America traded it's wealth and soul for a gun... because that is the only trust they have... Sad I think...”