It's a bit of apples-to-oranges, perhaps, but it's worth remembering that there have always been other economic policy options available to our political leaders beyond the ones they've chosen: That they didn't "have" to rescue the American financial system, and they didn't "have" to prop it up with perpetual stimulus to boost asset prices. These things they chose to do. They weren't "forced to" because more effective alternatives have always been available:
Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.Now, the island is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago have put it on a trajectory that’s turned 2 percent unemployment into a realistic goal.
While the euro area grapples with record joblessness, led by more than 25 percent in Greece and Spain, only about 4 percent of Iceland’s labor force is without work. Prime MinisterSigmundur D. Gunnlaugsson says even that’s too high.
“Politicians always have something to worry about,” the 38-year-old said in an interview last week. “We’d like to see unemployment going from where it’s now---around 4 percent---to under 2 percent, which may sound strange to most other western countries, but Icelanders aren’t accustomed to unemployment.”
And neither should we. A job that pays a livable wage should be a right, not a privilege, and if the jobs just can't be created, then a guaranteed annual income. Sure, there will always be some poor people in this country---nobody believes we can eradicate poverty completely. But the economic system under which we toil deliberately creates millions of poor and jobless people as a means of generating value for shareholders. We don't need fine-tune it with MyRAs or technology hubs or public-private partnerships; we need to grenade it and rebuild it from the ground up.
---Baron V
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