The economic system we've got going in the United States is fraught with inefficiency. So much productive talent is being wasted because there just aren't enough jobs to go around; how strange that the market -- the famous omniscient Invisible Hand -- all too often utterly fails to call forth production even when confronted with boundless human potential. I'm fed up with the economic establishment's attitude that business cycles are somehow "natural," as if it's just fine and dandy to let the market take us way off our production possibilities frontier. If there's a sin in economics, it's untapped (but tappable) resources.
IMHO the largest problem hindering the Western (or at least the US) economic climate is lack of a central information clearinghouse where all willing workers in existence can declare their skills to all employers in existence. Having to search through a gazillion different job search engines and newspapers, or having to rely on connections, or even worse, trying to start one's own business without a huge helping hand from some body experienced in local market analysis, is so 1990s. The job searcher is constantly being led down false paths while that perfect job opportunity slips by. Just as the automobile met the Interstate Highway System and it was kismet (albeit with fatal car accidents), something must make use of the Internet to take us into a more efficient economic era.
It's times like this when I feel the government is justified in stepping in, and perhaps even printing money to call forth production when the private market's demand for labor falls below the supply of willing workers. There are burned-out and abandoned houses that need torn down and rebuilt; cityscapes that need beautified; food that needs to be grown to feed the needy in Africa (let alone the needy at home). Of course this process should reverse itself to the appropriate degree upon economic recovery. It's the Keynesian answer to Marx's reserve army of labor, the existence of which allows employers to engage in the kind of "I've-got-your-balls-to-the-wall" behavior Boo describes. Employ the reserve army and that should hypothetically disappear.
EDIT: Alfadorredux, if you're not in immediate danger of severe economic hardship, you may want to try an internship or volunteer work to build your connections base. You're right, connections are your best shot at landing employment at all -- even at a restaurant chain or a department store in some areas. Of course one's connections are oftentimes independent of one's skillset, which is what I take issue with from an economic efficiency standpoint. But you can meld those two by working for free, because nothing impresses people quite like willingness to work without pay. That has been my experience at least.
EDIT: Although, on a really sad note, it seems the free market always finds a way to reinstitute slavery in some form, doesn't it?
