An Economics Lecture No Student Will Ever Hear

Good morning. Take your seats, turn off your cell phones, and keep them off for the duration of this lecture.

Today's subject is jobs. As even the dimmest among you are aware, we're in a jobless recovery, which means that economic activity is picking up, but businesses just aren't hiring enough workers to bring down the unemployment rate to an acceptable level.

Between now and the November elections, Republicans will blame Democrats for this mess, and Democrats will say that it's all the Republicans' fault. The decibel level will be excruciating. If you're among those who would rather argue than understand, don't waste your time or my energy; get up now and leave through the side door. But if you really want to understand why we're not creating new jobs fast enough, put aside your politics and let me teach you the one thing about economics you should have learned in high school.

Look at the bloody comments. Even on AT there is someone moaning about George W. Bush! AAARRRGH! They are broken records!

Nobody - least of all conservatives - endorsed TARP. Why do they persist in this line of ‘reasoning?’

Unless they have a time machine then the past cannot be changed. Why not focus on the massive crisis staring us in the face RIGHT NOW?

Now you can understand why we're in a jobless recovery: Some of the politicians we've elected have no idea that creating and maintaining an environment in which entrepreneurs will thrive is what they're supposed to do. Others we've elected have a vague notion that this is what they're supposed to do, but no idea how to do it. And too many of the politicians we've elected actually want those entrepreneurs to fail so public support will grow for replacing our free-market economy with a command economy -- one in which the government really calls the shots.

The author likens the (US) economy to a computer operating system. He concludes that the reason the recovery is 'jobless' is that many in government are attempting to manipulate the 'operating system' in ways that it was not designed, and therefore it should not be surprising that we are not getting the desired reduction in unemployment (more jobs).

I would extend the analogy further: this is a "demonstration" being orchestrated at the highest levels of the Obama Administration in an attempt to prove to the uneducated that "free markets" don't work. They are building an argument for "a new operating system", ie. a command economy.

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