Good piece. Massive government intervention in the economy is always and everywhere a disaster.
The current depression may outlast the depth and length of old one—because our leaders insist on being “dumb and dumber”—and believing their own lies.
I wouldn’t even start thinking about the word “recovery” a day before 2020—and then it will be have to be a new round of major technological breakthroughs to overwhelm the brain-dead government policies.
You are right about the next round of economic growth coming from the next wave of technology innovation. In the 20s, the nation’s utilities were growing very rapidly and electrifying the nation. As the article points out, mass production was widely adopted and led to tremendous reduction in the prices of consumer goods just as electricity was arriving. And the growth of fossil-fuel transportation (cars and truck) revolutionized the delivery of goods and people.
In the 90s, we saw the same thing with the advent of low-cost computing power, the very rapid rise of local and wide area networks, and the coming of very low-cost data storage. All of these innovations in the 20s and 90s led to huge gains in productivity which, in the end, is the only thing that really creates new wealth.
The next big wave of wealth creation and market boom will be triggered by another productivity-enhancing technology. But, at this point, it is hard to discern what that might be. I don’t believe it will be clean-tech because these systems, at best, replace existing energy sources with higher costs. In fact, these “solutions” are going to increase costs either directly or indirectly through higher taxation to pay subsidies. Unfortunately, this will drag rather than propel the economy.