There’s a great discussion forum on the New York Times online blog that highlights the differences in approaches across the pond. The Germans seem to really have it made, social safety net-wise, while the French just seem to enjoy the joie of being lazy.

Problem is, we could adopt the Eurosocialist approach of paying people not to work, or to work less, and gut our (and the world’s only) global police force, and we could all be realxing at home right now with the government’s covering our lost wages.

But then how could we as bosses and employers get rid of the riff-raff and n’er-do-wells when recessions provide us the golden opportunity? Such a quandary: Would I rather say permanent goodbye to a jerk or two (or more) or spend some more time with my wife and dogs?

There is a genius to the harsh, cruel world of American capitalism, I must confess.

(If you visit the NYT page, tell me–doesn’t that guy at the top look like your typical ugly American, though the photo is credited to Agence France Presse?)

Here are the “facts”:

The Chrysler Building in 1929 and the Empire State Building in 1930 gave way to the Great Depression. The Sears Tower and World Trade Center of the 1970s yielded a decade of stagflation. For the Asian crash of 1997, the Petronas Twin Towers of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, proved the culprit.

More currently, last year’s construction of ten (ten!) sky-highers at an average height of more than 1,000 feet took the world’s economy down as they went up. Finally, this year the Burj Dubai skyscraper, at 800 meters, or more than 2,500 feet, will become the world’s tallest building by a factor approaching two, but will it lead to the world’s greatest depression?

Stay tuned, and we’ll all find out, like it or not.

The release listed the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts as its source, so I began doing some digging around the Web. What I discovered was actually pretty startling.

First, as for the release, the authors didn’t even use the latest data, which was for the 12-month period ending September 2008, which saw business filings rise 49 percent from September 2007–38,651 now and 25,925 then.

Now for the somewhat startling part: As bad as the current figures are, for the most part things were much worse in 2004 and 2005, and nobody is calling those recessionary years.

Over the past five years (September to September), business bankruptcies have stayed nearly steady except for two fairly “good years” in 2006 and 2007. In 2004, 34,817 businesses filed; in 2005, 34,222; in 2006, 27,333; in 2007, 25,925; and in 2008, 38,651.

Overall, there are four types or chapters of bankruptcy–chapters 7, 11, 12 and 13. Let’s look at the trends for all chapters and all filers over the past five years: In 2004, there were 1,168,987 filings; in 2005, 1,782,643; in 2006, 1,112,542; in 2007, 801,269; and in 2008, 1,042,993. So, in point of fact, bankruptcy filings have a ways to go to catch up to the good ‘ol “boom days” of the housing bubble in 2004-2005.

If I were to offer my interpretation to all of this, I would say that the twin good years of 2006 and 2007 saw people exhausting and living high off the hog from the salad days of the real estate bubble. Then in 2008, as it always does, reality caught up to everyone from Wall Street to Main Street.

(Of course, there’s another side to this, and that is that the Bush Boys tightened bankruptcy rules around 2005, so there may have been a rush to file before the new, more restrictive law kicked in.)

Today, Mr. and Mrs. Small Business can no longer tap into their HELOCs, which they’ve depleted, and for everyone on Main Street and Wall Street, the banks and lenders have adopted a policy of “just say no.”

That leaves the federal government, whose largess has gotten so ridiculous that porn magnates Larry Flynt and Joe Francis yesterday asked for a $5-billion federal bailout of the adult industry.

“People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in a statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such, but they cannot do without sex.”

Can’t argue with that logic, I guess.

That’s why, when one surveys the pain going around in 2008, it’s illustrative that 1.1 million men have lost their jobs this year while their female counterparts are enjoying a net gain of 12,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department.

Factory jobs are disappearing, and being robotized and mechanized, while Information Age jobs are growing.  We mustn’t overlook the health care sector either.  That was the source of 400,000 new jobs for women this year alone.

Anyway, you get the drift here.  As painful and unsettling as recessions are, they exist for a reason and ultimately lead to needed social and workforce changes.

It’s like the Chinese say when they want to curse you:  “May you live in interesting times.”