The Great Recession of 2012

This is an excerpt from: "The Great Recession of 2012" which appeared in the Feb. 2010 issue of American Spectator.

The Great Recession of 2012

"It will get ugly, make no mistake. How ugly? Wait until those things we consider “rights” start to get squeezed in the interest of what our ruling politicians decree as the national interest. The uproar that greeted the mere suggestion that health care resources for the elderly might be circumscribed was genteel debate by contrast with what’s ahead. The notion that rights can be rescinded as easily as they have been obtained is not a happy thought. Case in point: my mother recalled that she and my father had to marry in secret and she continued to live with her parents throughout 1936 because the New Dealers who controlled the Pennsylvania state legislature had decreed that no married woman could be a public school teacher or hold another state job when a jobless married man could take her place. Try that out on the next dinner table debate you attend and see how many bread rolls get thrown at you by women who are convinced that it can’t happen again; times have changed, they’ve come a long way, baby. Well, yes. Nowadays most women don’t have the option not to work.

HOW LONG WILL THIS DARK AGE LAST? Ask the Japanese, who have been at it for nearly 20 years. Ask the Chinese, who are just making a heroic jump out of a medieval time-warp into a modern industrial urban society only to teeter on the brink for lack of enough food, water, and arable land even as they accumulate piles of American dollars that lose value every day. How long? As a teenager growing up in Tampa in the 1950s I recall traveling south through a ghost town called Sun City on the way to Sarasota. This abandoned village had streets, municipal buildings, sidewalks, even steps up to residential lots, all laid out during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. What it lacked were houses and residents. And so it stayed for nearly 40 years, until Del Webb developed the retirement community and resort nearby and appropriated the name. Now people are fleeing Florida once again, and ghostly, empty high-rise condos dot the landscape.

Now ask yourself, how long will it take to reclaim the empty neighborhoods in Detroit, the empty condos in Las Vegas, or Phoenix, or, for that matter, in the McMansion-style suburbs that surround Washington, D.C.? What new jobs can be created to absorb the millions who have not only lost their jobs but who have stopped looking? What will those jobs make, and who will buy what is being offered?"