Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Ecce Moron

Mort Zuckerman of US News & World Report is sick and tired of the free market as he tells us in his editorial "The free market is not up to the job of creating work".

I will have to get a ruling from Mungowitz, but I am pretty sure that the market creates wealth and not necessarily work.

But more importantly, and related to my post about the massive negativity on display in the MSM. Zuckerman takes the current employment situation and extrapolates it out for the forseeable future, basically claiming we will have "long term double digit unemployment", with no evidence given really except that jobs have been lost and we have high unemployment right now.

Here is the craziest sentence:

"Alas, the prospects for re-employment are diminished by the fact that many jobs may never come back, for example in finance and car manufacturing. This means growth alone will not fully employ America again."

Actually, his conclusion may be even funnier:

"Only massive programmes are equal to the challenge of restoring stable growth to our economy. One such programme would be to establish a National Infrastructure Bank, advocated by prominent Democrat Felix Rohatyn, to which the government would assign the $65bn (£40bn, €45bn) annually allocated to support infrastructure construction nationally. The bank would have the capacity to borrow, with federal guarantees, an additional $200bn. This programme would ensure a rational rather than a political investment in infrastructure, and provide long-term infrastructure development on a major scale with a maximum multiplier effect on the economy."

Of course a government funded bank would not have any political component to allocating the funds. Plus if it is a bank, then it must give loans, right? How would they be repaid? By only building toll roads and bridges?

What a dope!

5 comments:

Kunal said...

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

I propose that in order to create jobs, we bring back the Pharaohs. Imagine, those dudes were so good at creating jobs that they had to capture people from other countries and force them to do that jobs that needed doing!

The Pharaoh would also invest in our crumbling post-vital infrastructure. Its a win-win for everyone!

Eric H said...

What business does the guy who directed Airplane! have talking about the economy?

Anonymous said...

Fortunatelty, Zuckerman's widely recognized as a dim bulb; few take him seriously.

Tom said...

Government is great at creating work. Just think of all the work that will be done to create the consumer goods being bought (unearned) with the stimulus package money.

I remember when "creating work" was considered a bad thing.

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