The latest TIME cover story "Out of work in America" ,by Joshua Ramo, caught my eye with this subtitle: "Why double digit unemployment may be here to stay - and how to live with it" (emphasis mine).

My first thought was here's main stream 'Big Media' making excuses for Obama now (9.5% unemployment) and for the future ('how to live with it'). Well, the article doesn't live up to that expectation completely. It's worse. Rather than making excuses for how to live with high unemployment, it advocates for even BIGGER government policies and spending to cope with and remedy this situation.

But it does attempt to shield Obama from any blame for the high unemployment, without blatantly continuing the 'It's all Bush's fault' line, with an 'if we make it seem like long-term double digit unemployment is a fait accompli, it won't hurt Him when it happens' tactic: "[T]he country faces the prospect of long-term, double-digit unemployment;" "Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession?"; "And if the result is that we're stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while.."; "[T]he Federal Reserve is predicting moderate growth at best. That means more than a decade without real employment expansion." (I could go on, but I'm starting to feel a little woozy).

That one about '9% to 11%' is an onerous subtheme to this story: this recession is Obama's 9-11, The Great Crisis, offering him the power, if he will only seize it, to remake the economy how he sees fit, like Bush remade the military, our foreign policy, and his presidency following the true 9-11.

With that early hint at the 9-11 crisis theme, the author first lays the ground for why we are at this point. Every bad economic fact ("The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts" [i.e., at a predictable rate]) is countered by and explained by mystic forces that no one can explain ("Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession, something unpredicted by the experts.") Larry Summers, the president's top economic adviser, is a primary source for this article because his specialty in economics is labor. What does he think? "[I]f you could have areas where there was long term substantial unemployment, then that raised some questions about the functioning of markets." The author continues, "In essence, Summers saw in unemployment a chance to explore how markets don't work - and to think about policies that could correct for the failures."

So now that the author, aided and abetted by the President's very own economic adviser, has constructed the false baseline that we have no idea how we got here, he lays out the solution. "The jobs crisis offers an opportunity [Rham's 'don't let a crisis go to waste', anyone?] to think in profound ways about how and why we work, about what makes employment satisfying, about the jobs Americans can and should do best. But the ideas Washington has delivered so far are insufficient. ...[W]e're hearing few interesting ideas about how to enhance America's already groaning unemployment support system.." (emphasis added).

What really struck me was the part about 'the jobs Americans can and SHOULD do best'. He's saying Government should decide what jobs we will be doing, not companies that operate in the market place, learning what goods and services people are willing to pay for. But the Government! Scary thought.

Ramo lays out the options, as he sees them. As a bone to conservatives, he throws out the '1930s option', having "the government directly employ millions of people in labor fronts". Wait, he didn't throw that out on conservative principles, but because it is impractical to try and persuade 'laid off hedge-fund traders to switch to sewer repair'.

OK, what is option 2? Rely on "traditional strategies" to "create demand through growth, cheap money and massive government spending." OK, I'll give him credit: this is a jab at both Bush AND Obama. But that will only have a minor impact, he reports ("some jobs will return"). Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, he spends a great deal of time promoting the idea that the exact jobs lost will not return, but only "whatever work they can get - fast food, nursing, you name it." Yeah, nursing is just one of those jobs 'you get'. Apparently, in every previous down turn except the Great Depression, everyone that was laid off got hired back at the exact same job at the same wage when the recovery occurred.

So Option 2 doesn't give us what he wants, the jobs Americans "should do". What we need, is:

1. "[A]n omnibus employment emergency bill that guarantees jobless workers a basic set ofÿ rights for two or three years":
A. "Healthcare".
B. "Access to retraining".
C. "Subsidized mentoring for careers in high-end manufacturing or health services".

2. Obama should "bring together innovative minds in technology and service - the people who run consumer-driven businesses like Disney and Google - to find ways to make the process of being unemployed less of a bureaucratic and emotional mess."

3. "[A] sensible set of policies would shift the landscape of job creation. It would transfer money out of Wall Street and into community lending to encourage the formation of new companies. It would create local business pods [WTF?] in which neighbors ask, What do we do well here, and how can we do it better?"

The author sums up his position nicely: "[T]raditional government policies are not going to pull us out of the job trap." Apparently we just haven't spent enough money in the right places to simply remake our economy and our workers so everyone comes back together in happy full employment with high union wages.

You know what's missing from this? Any acknowledgment whatsoever that maybe one of the reasons the markets aren't working, or this recession isn't following the rules, IS BECAUSE OF GOVERNMENT! The economy is broken, and only the WE we believe in can fix it!

Maybe the government should get out of the way, and stop looking at workers as groups that need retraining. Stop seeing companies as providing the right or wrong type of job, or the right or wrong type of product. Maybe if the government started allowing individuals to decide for themselves what jobs they want to do, at what wage, for what benefits, and let our great companies decide what products to bring to market and compete, lowering the price while improving the performance and service, THEN the economy would recover just fine.