A Simple Choice

Is it a shortage of workers, or a shortage of work? Structural issues with Americans and who they are, or macro issues about which Americans have been fed a load of crap for more than a decade? You can see why those who may have been manufacturing raw manure might have an interest in swaying the debate toward the structural. Or preventing the debate from happening at all.

A shortage of work manifests itself very differently than a shortage of workers. In the former, employers take a languid approach to securing employees. They are in no rush because there is no rush. Business is tepid so in most cases, why bother?

If the economy is really booming, however, companies attack their labor needs in a vastly different manner. Where new business could be the price to pay for being unsuccessful in the labor market, there is no price a rational company wouldn’t pay for labor. It really is that simple.

Beyond the absence of corroborative behavior (and anecdotes don’t count), there is a much larger problem for those arguing the deficiency comes from within Americans. It’s not just here in the US where the data shows the same economic shortfall. As noted earlier today, Sweden just recently took a step toward populism because there is a clear shortage of economy.

It’s not one that anyone will talk about, of course, because the topic is strictly forbidden by central bankers who are responsible for the disaster. If these policymakers can convince the world that it is someone else’s fault, yours, then so much the better for them.

They can get away with it in America because much of the media here loathes most Americans, especially those unskilled (and uneducated, in the formal sense) who have been hardest hit by the lost decade. Sweden, though? It is often described as the standard for how things should be.

In other words, either the Swedish are as lazy and drug addicted as Americans are purported to be by Economists, or Economists are indeed responsible for this unfolding and worldwide economic disaster. We’ve reached the point after eleven years, and now contemplating the prospects for a fourth downturn, where it truly is a binary option.