The Recession: A Groundbreaking Liberal Perspective

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/the-tea-party-take-two.html?_r=1&ref=joenocera

A one-sided New York Times editorial is the only type of editorial they know how to write. This is particularly obvious when their writers are discussing the causes of the recession. There were three of them, by my count: deregulation, greed, and deregulation. Some commentators were of the opinion that a fourth factor, a culture of deregulation, was also to blame, but that is beyond my pay grade to determine. Here's Joe Nocera, just trying to fit in:

"I like to joke that there’s nothing like a good financial crisis to turn you into a liberal. But it’s not really a joke. The more I learned the back story that led to the crisis, the more horrified I became. The lack of regulation and oversight of Wall Street and the big subprime companies like Countrywide, driven by the ideology of deregulation, was thoughtless and irresponsible. The refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses bordered on the criminally negligent."

Yes, if those were the sole causes of this financial crisis, there would be a ton more liberals than there currently are. Needless to say, there is not a single mention in the entire article of government's role in the crisis. No mention of Freddie Mac, no mention of Fannie Mae, no mention of the Community Reinvestment Act. People who choose to focus on those aspects will turn into conservatives. People who ignore them, like Joe Nocera, become liberals. (Really, of course, the causation runs the opposite way.) It's just silly to distort the causes of the recession for the sake of having a pithy joke handy in case the Times hires you to editorialize for them. But here's the funniest part:

"So far this year, G.D.P. growth is under 1 percent. The stock market is skittish. Companies have cash, but they aren’t hiring because there is no demand for their products."

That's right folks. There is no demand for companies' products. I did not edit that sentence. I did not remove some modifier like "penis-enlargement" or "phonograph" or "used tampon" that would make it make sense to claim that there is no demand. Read it again. Companies. Have no demand. This is groundbreaking news, at least to someone like me who sometimes buys things that-- I thought-- I needed. But apparently I was wrong. People don't want things anymore.

The conservative angle on why companies aren't hiring is because of uncertainty caused by the Obama administration's constantly changing regulations. Some proof for the liberal angle, or at least an acknowledgement of the conservative one, would have been nice. And unexpected.