The Militant Libertarian

I'm pissed off and I'm a libertarian. What else you wanna know?

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Now It’s Jobs

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The downturn is following a path so predictable, day by day, that people who comprehend the business cycle don’t even need to read the news. You can intuit what will happen next because it’s happening like a textbook case – even as it is reported with a continued sense of surprise.

Press reporting on the downturn has been like reports from a committee that knows nothing about gravity, but which has nonetheless been assigned to watch what happens when you drop objects from high places.

They keep filing surprised reports about how the objects fall – what a bizarre and unwelcome turn of events – and then they conjure up ways to keep this from happening through some outside intervention. They recommend bailouts, spending, programs, controls, and inflation.

You just want to get their attention and explain: what you are observing is part of the structure of reality itself, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can cover your eyes, put up fancy mirrors, turn somersaults, speculate and talk and decry all you want. But in the end, the downturn is a necessary and inevitable response to the previous boom. It must be allowed to continue on its course.

Most recently, for example, we have seen an uptick in the unemployment rate, now at 6.7% according to official statistics. Here we have the human face of recession. It is also the inevitable response to the boom. The people over-employed in bubbled-up industries are led from failing sectors into viable ones – with a serious transition cost. Wages adjust downward and people move from uneconomic undertakings to more economically viable ones.

What is enough to make a person crazy is how all this is reported as something correctable, as if they all constituted marching orders for Washington.

Read the rest at this link.

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