[dennisw]

For those men of working age there are not enough jobs to go around. That’s part of the reason so many useless government jobs are cooked up

We can produce enough food and manufactured items with an ever smaller number of workers. To avoid this cruel truth we create asset bubbles. We keep many employed in white collar sectors which do nothing to increase our wealth. Wall Street and lawyers come to mind. Dittos for mortgage brokers....many of them have no job since the phony housing boom collapsed

I am old enough to know an age when the labor of all working age men was needed. This is not how is today. Go open up some useless malls. Many malls and Sams Clubs are closing because they were never needed in the first place

[JasonC]

Everyone profitably employed earns their pay in value they add. Nobody needs your moral approval to add value and they do so in every sort of industry, including those you sneer at. Yes in recessions men who were working in sectors where demand has fallen are not needed in those specific jobs, and in the previous numbers; it adds value to let them go since production can be maintained without them. That is exactly what we have already accomplished in the present recession. They are then free to find work anywhere else doing anything useful, and they always do find such places. Not always at their previous wages, but always. All of the value they produce in their new jobs is net gain, because the output of existing industries is fully maintained without them.

Income is not raised by being in an industry that you approve of or that makes things you can hit with a stick. It is raised by productivity, and productivity is created and maintained by free competitive forces moving men and capital to where it does the most good, and away from legacy roles that no longer contribute anything.

There is nothing wrong with the US economy. It remains productive because it is free. The cycle we always have had and always will have; it makes no difference in the long run. Americans are more productive now than ever, and all the crapstorm moralizing nonsense pretending we are poor or broke is just that, nonsense. Every generation is richer than the last by large amounts and that goes straight on. Nothing happening now, or in the recent past, endangers any of it in the slightest.