President Obama is under the impression that history owes him $1 trillion right now to spend on whatever he wants. His language is strident and full of irritation that anyone would question his right to live out his personal dream of being Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush’s Hoover. This, he says, is what the election was all about.

There is a saying in the world of Austrian economics about the business cycle. The puzzle is not to explain business failures. Those are part of the normal course of life, and the sign of a healthy economy. The puzzle is to explain the “cluster of errors” that appears at the beginning of a recession. How could so many have been so wrong about so much at the same time? The business cycle is a system-wide failure, not merely the mistaken judgment of a few.

Editor’s Note: Lew Rockwell is a died-in-the-wool libertarian. He says this recession is a correction to an overly pumped economic boom. It is not an aberration crying out for correction. It is the result of an unsustainable economic bubble that preceded it. Lew says it should be welcomed in the same way we welcome a sober day after a drunken evening, or the detoxification of an addict after a period of addiction.