Right, 82 year olds can't usually work anyway so state pensions are indeed not holding back the economy. It gets blurrier in the somewhat common case where stat

Right, 82 year olds can't usually work anyway so state pensions are indeed not holding back the economy. It gets blurrier in the somewhat common case where state pensions can be awarded at, e.g. 55 (see Greece, US air traffic controllers...). I was mostly thinking of minimum wages, out-of-work credits, long term disability benefits in the case where working is actually possible, etc. I think your description of Keynesian monetary policy in terms of addiction is interesting! You can view 2008 as either caused by regulation or deregulation, it's a fascinating event in that way, and is why different parties were at loggerheads over it. The view that it was caused by deregulation is as you say: banks were allowed to do risky things that leveraged up their risk until they were going to fail, and this provoked the crisis. The view that it was caused by regulation is to observe that the only reason banks aren't allowed to collapse in the first place is the odd way in which they are regulated. A banking license is a regulatory permission to tell people they have $1000 on deposit whilst not actually being able to service such a withdrawal. In the case of a normal company like FTX, that's fraud. With the right license, it's not. If retail banks weren't allowed to do anything with deposits except keep them safe, they could not have become endangered by bad aggregated mortgage debt, and then could have just been allowed to fail. It would have hurt investors a ton but bubbles always do - the ATMs would have kept working though and that's what politicians really respond to, the crisis of the innocent working guy. To fix this situation you don't pass a law, you repeal a law, hence, caused by regulation.