Frank Zappa once said that “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”

That certainly describes Rolling Stone magazine when it wanders off music into areas where it completely lacks what the lawyers call “standing.”

Instead of wasting your time reading Jesse Myerson‘s рубец, read Seth Davis‘ demolition of Myerson’s навоз:

Over the weekend, Jesse Myerson, a twenty-something former Occupy organizer, finally stumbled upon a foolproof recipe for success for today’s struggling Millennials. The recipe? Communism, naturally.

Myerson, whose Twitter bio includes the hashtag #FULLCOMMUNISM (for when fractional communism just can’t murder people quickly enough), listed five economic reforms that he thinks every Millennial should demand: Guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income, no more private real estate, no more private assets at all, and a public bank in every state (a great place to store all those financial assets you no longer own). If that sounds eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon, it’s because it is eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon. …

Look, lots of people think everybody else’s stuff should be their stuff. Unfortunately for Myerson, most of those people drink juice out of a box and think Cookie Monster and Dora the Explorer are real people. There’s a time and a place to brag that you’ve finally figured out how to make communism work, and it’s your college dorm room at 3:00 a.m. If you publish a serious call for the reconstruction of several core pillars of communism barely two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (this is the point at which Myerson would almost certainly interject that the USSR wasn’t practicing real communism, maaan), you’re pretty much begging to be mocked.

But what makes Myerson’s article so precious is that either he’s too dumb to know what the Soviet Union stood for (or too lazy to have done a quick Google search prior to clicking “Publish”), or he thinks his readers are too dumb to discern that he’s actually pushing for a return to Soviet-style communism. In his defense, he published his Marxist mash note at Rolling Stone — a site run by a seemingly drug-addled 23-year-old nepot — so maybe he has a point about the collective IQ of his readers. …

As Andrew McCoy noted shortly after Myerson’s piece was published, Myerson’s ideas aren’t just similar to Soviet ideas. They are Soviet ideas, which should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union. According to McCoy’s research, each of Myerson’s five reforms was contained in the USSR’s Constitution. Guaranteed jobs are in Article 40. Social insurance for everybody is in Article 43. Abolition of private real estate is in Article 6. Complete abolition of all other private property is in Articles 4 and 5. And government-owned banks — the only banks allowed in the Soviet Union — were a natural byproduct of a system that says only the government can own things. …

If Myerson wants to see what a government-engineered “climate collapse” (whatever that means) looks like, he need only study the Great Chinese Famine, a three-year period of absolute desolation caused directly by Mao’s communist regime. Between 1958 and 1962 alone, upwards of 45 million Chinese died as a result of the Mao-engineered famine, while another 30 million failed to be born because of the communist-caused carnage. As a percentage of the country’s total population, those 45 million Chinese deaths would be roughly equivalent to the entire populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia being wiped out between now and 2018, all thanks to government fiat. I’m pretty sure my capitalist air-conditioning and SUV haven’t murdered 45 million people since 2009, but your mileage may vary.

For all his faults, though, Myerson really is the perfect 21st century chickenhawk communist. Oh, you live in Manhattan, make close to six figures, and went to a middling NY liberal arts college where the cost of a single credit hour exceeds the GDP per capita of a whole host of African countries? Tell me more about how you’re down with The Struggle™. Nothing says certified prole like black-and-white candids, three-piece suits, and finely manicured beards, amirite?

Between this sort of nonsense and its fawning Boston Bomber coverage, Rolling Stone is clearly trying to cement itself as Slate for the dumb set (but I repeat myself) with a traffic model that all but begs people to mock its stupidity. No longer wanting to be confined to writing terrible music reviews, Rolling Stone is basically becoming the print equivalent of clips of the grape-stomping local TV reporter, minus the shame and embarrassment.

If you believe Democrats (and, you know, I could stop writing right there), the economy is recovering.

But if the economy is recovering, why is Congress passing an extension of unemployment benefits?

Ask U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisconsin), who congratulated herself in a news release:

A new report released by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee shows that the long-term unemployment rate is twice what it was when Congress last allowed federal unemployment insurance to expire after the recessions of 1990-91 and 2001. Approximately 1.3 million workers, including 23,700 Wisconsinites, lost all unemployment benefits when Congress failed to act before the end of December.

Maybe Baldwin should have a conversation with her president about our great economy. Baldwin also fired shots at Gov. Scott Walker, ignoring the fact that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is lower than the nation’s, and has been lower than the nation’s throughout Walker’s term as governor.

The obvious explanation of that previous paragraph is that it’s an election year. The other answer is that, well, the economy isn’t recovering in ways non-economists can see, reports John Lott:

It has been over four-and-a-half years since the economic “recovery” began, yet a new CNN poll indicates that almost seven out of every ten Americans considers the economy to be in poor shape.

Democrats want to claim that the economy is improving at the same time that they will be pushing Monday for a continued extension of unemployment benefits. Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that up to two years of unemployment insurance benefits actually creates unemployment.

Indeed, people are so worried about the job market that they are clinging to their current jobs at remarkably high rates.

Quit rates that usually rise after recessions, particularly after long recessions when they have stayed with jobs they might not care for, are still lower over the last three months than they were during the recession.

But how can that possibly be?

The official unemployment rate keeps falling. We are told that the job market is improving.  Are Americans just not realizing that things are getting better? Or do they perceive of something that the unemployment numbers are not picking up?

The answer is the latter.

The unemployment numbers do not accurately reflect the state of the labor market.  The reason is that the unemployment rate only considers those who are actively looking for work, failing to include the ones who have become so discouraged that they no longer look for a job.

Even the broader U6 measure of unemployment only includes these discouraged workers in its count for just one year.  With the traditional measure of unemployment that keeps being reported on the news, these discouraged individuals are counted as officially having left the labor force.

Imagine if workers had not dropped out and that the labor force participation had remained the same as it was when Obama became president 60 months ago. …

As we can see, the official unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009 and slowly fell to 7 percent today.  But if we add the drop-outs to the unemployed, the current rate would still be 11 percent, virtually unchanged since it hit 11.1 percent in October 2009.