So there are a few things to think about with respect to the recovery. Disclaimer: I am not an economist. One thing is that to a certain extent an economy is

So there are a few things to think about with respect to the recovery. Disclaimer: I am not an economist. One thing is that to a certain extent an economy is psychological. Yes, certain things are physical realities (such as crop yields) or political realities (e.g. states of war) or legal realities (like regulations against selling homemade beer), but a lot else is purely based on sentiment. And it doesn’t matter how good reality is if people think it’s bad: they won’t act in the market more than they must to survive, and it will actually be a bad market, even if the fundamentals justify a good one — at least for awhile, until enough contrarians seek to take advantage of good prices (a kind of sentiment arbitrage, I suppose). But something I worry about even more is well-intended interventions which make things worse and prolong the poor economy. There’s precedent for this in history: the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was intended to alleviate the Great Depression but instead exacerbated it. Specifically, I can think of laws against so-called ‘price-gouging’ (which is a myth: no-one in all of human history has ever paid more for something than he felt it was worth to him at the time he bought it, because whenever anyone feels the all-in price for something is more than the all-in value … he doesn’t buy it): by interfering with the price mechanism which is the fundamental method for economic actors to bid for their needs and desires to be met, it will result in less-efficient allocation of resources (capital and labour) across the entire market. This misinvestment will by definition lead to a poorer economy than would otherwise be the case.