However, I think the quote is misleading in that it trivializes lending as going only to build Pizza Huts and strip malls. Credit is the lubricant that keeps the wheels of a market economy from seizing up. Businesses use short term credit to buffer irregular cash flow when carrying out essential functions like making payroll and purchasing inventory. Many business also have debt vehicles that require periodic refinancing and will become insolvent if it is not available. Without access to credit markets many business – functioning, profitable business – will suffer.

Unfortunately, the administrations efforts with the credit markets are not going well even in the view of sympathetic commenters like Paul Krugman.

I don’t believe that this Congress and this Administration are so much interested in fixing the economy as they are in taking advantage of the situation to greatly expand their power and their share of the nation’s money supply. I would not be surprised if they would be fine with a permanently weakened economy — albeit one that is more robust than it is at this moment — if they can severely weaken the influence and power of those who oppose their policies, while at the same time increasing their loyal base dramatically with the transfer of wealth that is part of the process of weakening the opposition.

A shadow of the free-market system on life support is all they really need. A majority of people can become used to the notion of 8 or more percent unemployment as “normal” (especially with expanded unemployment benefits), and also with anemic economic growth as long as they themselves are not innovators, entrepreneurs, or even small business owners. If they can get either a decent paycheck throughout the productive portion of their lives — or the expanded unemployment benefits for the even less ambitious — then the system as envisioned by the current administration and congress will limp along until it collapses for future generations.