Big Government, Big Education, Big Unemployment, No Skills

Modern westerners have grown complacent and sheep-like in the face of governments that have inserted themselves into every aspect of their lives. This "government-uber-alles" is not working out well.

Consider the shortage of "skilled workers":

Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, a research paper by Manpower Inc (NYSE:MAN - News) concludes.

"It becomes a real choke-point in future economic growth," Manpower Chief Executive Jeff Joerres said. "We believe strongly this is really an issue in the labor market." _finance.yahoo

Governmental emphasis on college attendance may be turning universities into huge, opulent drop-out factories. Trying to force everyone into college -- whether suited for higher education or not -- is a good recipe for destroying young lives by teaching them to think of themselves as failures.

Meanwhile, university administrations have become bloated with bureaucrats and functionaries, driving the costs of higher education inexorably upward.

...the Obama Administration’s priorities is to funnel more money into higher education–which will reinforce exactly the sorts of pressures that Greene highlights. Higher education almost perfectly converts subsidies (whether direct or aid to students) into higher prices. With no real reason to expect that those subsidies will be used to promote better substantive outputs instead of internal agency costs. _Volokh

Businesses are reluctant to hire new employees in a highly uncertain economic climate. Meanwhile, tenured and unionised government workers -- such as teachers -- are becoming the new privileged classes, relentlessly sucking the blood out of a shriveling private sector which is headed toward critical care life support.

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Government defaults are inevitable, in large part due to ballooning pensions, wages, and benefits to unionised government workers.

Under Obama - Pelosi, US governments are doing everything wrong from top to bottom. Sucking the productive and taxpaying segment of the country dry, the O-P regime is laying the groundwork for perpetual economic shortages for the indefinite future (example).

When governments insert themselves into every activity of every productive member of their society, inefficiencies and disruptions in the economy abound. When the voting public cannot tell the difference between politicians who will only dig the statist hole more deeply, and those who aim to take government controls away from the greater parts of society where government was never meant to be involved -- at that point society becomes an Idiocracy.

More: Here is a fascinating glimpse of the nature of government as it is evolving under Obama Pelosi