Unemployment Soars

In case you missed it this morning the unemployment numbers fro December were extremely disappointing. They showed the sharpest drop for a very long time and brought 2008 to a close as the worst year since 1945 – a year that America was readjusting to peace with millions of recently de-mobbed soldiers flooding the employment lines. Here’s the New York Times story: Unemployment Soars to Highest Level in 16 Years

Even now I read people making apologies for George Bush and his administration. Dick Cheney has said that no one could have foreseen the current malaise.

That is utter nonsense. Plenty of people did indeed forecast this mess. I posted Roubinis’ forecast this morning: he was clear about what he saw coming two or three years ago. And he was not alone. Yours truly predicted a downturn also!

The people now scurrying around to defend Bush are ideologically predisposed to defend market system economics theories. They didn’t foresee today’s events because they didn’t want to foresee them. Take Alan Greenspan as an example. he failed to deflate the housing bubble precisely because he was so driven by free market thinking and his obsession with Ayn Rand that he simply was immobilized even as the extent of the bubble became obvious. Similarly, to argue that deregulation was not at the root of the collapse of the financial system is an extraordinary act of denial. The groupthink that infested our elites made them collectively incapable of seeing the onrushing tsunami. that doesn’t mean that no one foresaw the consequences of the reckless policies that have been implemented since Reagan.

That they can sit around and claim otherwise merely means that they are not qualified to help in the reconstruction. they still don’t get that the current state of the economy is a massive and painful indictment of free market thinking.

The problem is that we are left with very thin ranks of independent thinkers to draw on for help.

Meanwhile that growing line of unemployed workers is a suitable monument both to Bush’s misguided belief in markets and to his deliberate undermining of the competency of government.

That goodness he’s almost gone.