Can you say "Capital Strike?" I knew you could

Boy the Obami really did learn their New Deal history, didn't they?  Another way to say it is that the Job Market is defying history because those in power have defied rational economics.  Bastiat, baby, Bastiat.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The job market is defying history.

A dismal June employment report shows that employers are adding nowhere near as many jobs as they normally do this long after a recession has ended.

Unemployment has climbed for three straight months and is now at 9.2 percent. There's no precedent, in data going back to 1948, for such a high rate two years into what economists say is a recovery.

The economy added just 18,000 jobs in June. That's a fraction of the 90,000 jobs economists had expected and a sliver of the 300,000 jobs needed each month to shrink unemployment significantly.

The excruciatingly slow growth is confounding economists, spooking consumers and dismaying job seekers. Friday's report forced analysts to re-examine their assumption that the economy would strengthen in the second half of 2011.

They had expected improvement in June after a bleak jobs report for May. They figured that hiring in May had been artificially weakened by temporary factors -- a run-up in gasoline prices to $4 a gallon and factory disruptions caused by Japan's earthquake and nuclear crisis.