Relatively low? The labor-force participation rate hasn't been this low since 1977 . Ben is a master of understatement.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the economy is at full employment. The 5.1% headline unemployment rate would suggest that the labor market is close to normal. Other indicators—the relatively low labor-force participation rate, the apparent lack of wage pressures, for example—indicate that there is some distance left to go.

When I went to Tim Iacono's site to see his daily links this morning, there it was—a Wall Street Journal editorial by Ben Bernanke called How the Fed Saved The Economy . Not a humble man, Ben.

We already know Ben published his new book—it is titled The Courage To Act—to rationalize (defend, justify) the Fed's actions after the crisis, as he does in the WSJ editorial. This is not news, but there is one rationalization Ben puts forth which bears further scrutiny. We find it in CNN Money's Bernanke wanted Wall Street's worst in jail.

"If we hadn't prevented the collapse of Wall Street, then Main Street would've collapsed as well," Bernanke said... "I certainly was not eager to bail out Wall Street," Bernanke said. "We knew that if the financial system collapsed, the economy would immediately follow."

Well, we might ask is this true? And then we might further ask, if it is true, what does that mean for still struggling Americans?

I will grant Bernanke the first proposition, although we are dealing here with counterfactuals. There is no way to know what would have happened if Ben & Company had allowed the big banks to fail. Still, I'll assume he is right.

So, what does this mean for Main Street? Please watch this short video, which I recently posted here.

That is clear enough—the top 10% of Americans (by income) have reaped all of the gains (and more) since 2008, a trend which has been in place since the early 1980s.

Now contrast this with Ben's defense of American monetary (and fiscal) policy, from the WSJ editorial.

Europe’s failure to employ monetary and fiscal policy aggressively after the financial crisis is a big reason that eurozone output is today about 0.8% below its precrisis peak. In contrast, the output of the U.S. economy is 8.9% above the earlier peak—an enormous difference in performance. In November 2010, when the Fed undertook its second round of quantitative easing, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble reportedly called the action “clueless.” At the time, the unemployment rates in Europe and the U.S. were 10.2% and 9.4%, respectively. Today the U.S. jobless rate is close to 5%, while the European rate has risen to 10.9%.

But now it should be entirely clear that all of the income gains stemming from that 8.9% growth in output went to America's top earners. None of it went to the bottom 90%. So can we really speak about Main Street being saved?

Well, yes, if we are only considering the difference between having a lousy, low-paying job and having no job at all. But the problem runs deeper than that because the lamentable trend described in the video has been in place for 35 years. So let us return to the second question above—what does this mean for still struggling Americans?

It means that in 2008-2009 Ben Bernanke bailed out a broken, corrupt, grossly unfair and therefore illegitimate economic system. And that system has only gotten more corrupt and more unfair since then. (We could also argue about whether it is even more broken now than it was then, due in no small part to the actions of the Federal Reserve.)

So now we see these remarks from Ben in a new light, from CNN Money.

He still thinks the bailout was the right call, but looking back he wishes more corrupt Wall Street bankers who helped bring on the crisis went to jail. "You can't put a financial firm in jail," Bernanke told USA Today in an interview Sunday. "Everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm...there should have been more accountability at the individual level."

Nobody went to jail. And what, Ben, does that tell you about the socioeconomic system you bailed out? And what about the fact that Wall Street has done very, very well since 2008, while Main Street has languished? What does that tell you, Ben?

Ben will rationalize what the Fed did after the crisis, "wishing" that some evil-doers had gone to jail. But he will never come to grips with the simple, obvious things I've pointed out today.

It didn't require "courage" to bail out a criminal and thus illegitimate financial system in 2008. It would have required courage to recognize that some actors in the system were illegitimate, and not bail them out, thus asking the worst offenders to face the consequences of their actions.

Does Ben mean to imply that not bailing out various criminal enterprises would have destroyed the Main Street economy? If so, where does that leave us? At the mercy of criminals?

And what did Ben's Fed do in 2008-2009? It bought up then-worthless mortgage-backed "assets", which effectively let the previous owners of those "assets" off the hook.

Forgive me, Ben, if I don't believe that you saved me and the rest of the bottom 90%.