This week, the redoubtable Tom Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times which called the stock market bottom in the time-honored manner of big-time journalism: he told us that the sky is falling. The market promptly started an 11% rally, which is going to continue later this morning as I write.

Mr. Friedman wasn’t the only one. His colleague David Brooks also became alarmed by the fall in his 401(k) account and realized lately that this financial and economic crisis is the real thing. (I should have sent them links to my articles on the subject going back nearly two years now.)

Now that political and cultural commentators have realized they need to weigh in on the economic story, and in a way that considers more than just the evils of income inequality, we also have to deal with their prescriptions for how to handle the situation. This is a problem because Mr. Friedman, while perceptive about the nature and dimensions of the crisis, reflexively locates the potential solutions in government action. And ultimately in the slender, graceful hands of Barack Obama.

To Friedman, Obama seems distracted by other things and is lacking in needed focus on the economic crisis. (It would be closer to true to say that Obama and his team are simply out of their depth, and flailing.) But although there is some need for sustained government action, most of this crisis is impervious to what government can do.

Government can help create the conditions for an eventual recovery. But what’s going on is something they can’t fix.

Tom Friedman has recently been all about the idea that we can revitalize our economy, create millions of new jobs, and recapture the mantle of world leadership (which has passed to… who?), if we eliminate the use of low-cost energy by adding huge new taxes to any kind of carbon-based energy use. Now, in the wake of the recent sharp stock market decline, he’s moved off the green-energy topic to tell us that the deep freeze in the banking system has given our economy a case of congestive heart failure.

He also tells us that it’s the day after Pearl Harbor, and 9/12. Well, no. The global banking system has been in serious stress since late summer of 2007. The stock market has been falling more or less steadily since it peaked in October of that year.

There are four difficulties that Tom Friedman identifies as unique about the crisis:

Point 1: The need for markets to clear at lower levels. Yes, I agree with that. But there are several problems here. First, government policy from day one has been to prevent markets from clearing. We’ve been creating massive monetary inflation, and now fiscal inflation as well. It’s refreshing to hear a well-respected commentator tell us that failed homeowners and businesses need to go bankrupt (rather than being propped up by one government program after another).

But what will not happen is a fast recovery. The amount of capital that has been destroyed is simply too great to allow that. Friedman tells us that the carnage of the dot-com bust engendered a “whole new set” of companies. That’s not how I remember it. The only major technology company to go public in the wake of the bust was Google, which had been founded in 1996. We went through years of venture-capital deep-freeze, Mr. Friedman. I know because I was there. This will be just as bad, but across the whole economy.

Point 2: The need to create a secondary market for asset-backed securities. This is a creature that doesn’t exist in nature. We have trillions of dollars in mortgage-based assets that can’t be sold or marked to market at anything approaching par value. Right now, those securities are sitting mostly on the balance sheets of banks large and small.

But wherever they end up, they’re going to need to be financed. And that’s going to take enormous amounts of unleveraged capital which will then be unavailable for other uses. Friedman buys today’s talk of “public-private partnerships” in which the government can provide financing and loss-guarantees so that a small number of wealthy men like billionaire Wilbur Ross can make obscene profits buying out distressed assets.

This is a deep fantasy. Forget about the moral aspects of this, which Friedman simply sweeps under the carpet. (Indeed, he calls it a leadership challenge for Obama to convince Americans that a few rich men should get far richer for the good of all.) The real problem is that the capital has to come from somewhere. We’re going to be working off the overhang of mortgage losses and housing overvaluation for anywhere from three to five years. It does no good at all to suppose that Obama or anyone else can conjure capital, confidence and pixie dust out of his magic hat.

The economy simply has to deal with a historic readjustment to lower overall private debt levels and lower asset values. The only thing which can heal this problem is time. Time, and business confidence, which can only be damaged by the government’s continued flailing.

Point 3: Well, point 3 is that the President has a tough job. Ok, I can agree with that.

Point 4: The President has to tell us the sky is falling without scaring hell out of everyone. Well, I guess that’s hard to argue with too. Though now the President is taking a different route. We’ll see if that one works.

Friedman’s final prescription is for Obama to invite 60 leading bankers, businessmen and economists to Camp David, along with Congressional leaders from both parties, and have a round table discussion which will determine a “common, transparent strategy” for solving the banking crisis.

This speaks to the deep unreality of supposing that the economic crisis can be solved if only the smart people twist the right dials and push the right buttons. The dream of technocratic management has been a scourge of economic policy for many decades, and it refuses to die. But if Friedman’s proposed solution involves locking up the President with a lot of bankers, economists and legislators at Camp David for the duration, where they can do no harm … I could even bite off on the idea.