AP Photo

In a market economy, stuff gets produced, capacity grows, and people are employed when businesses see a decent chance to make strong sales and good profits. Right now, they see no such thing. Our economy is limping along, growing slowly—too slowly to make up much of the ground lost in the long, grinding recession. The members of the Federal Reserve Board expect that the unemployment rate will still be above 7 percent in 2012. (It was 4.6 percent in 2006 and 2007.) We are wasting productive capacity, eroding skills, and damaging families.

To coin a phrase, we need to get our economy moving again, and soon. It would be foolhardy to sit and wait for a spontaneous burst of consumer spending or business investment in a sluggish economy with high unemployment and with capacity...