>n fact, because of the points in the first two paragraphs here, there's good evidence that the more we muck around with the economy, the worse we actually make

>n fact, because of the points in the first two paragraphs here, there's good evidence that the more we muck around with the economy, the worse we actually make it. There is a large and growing faction of economists that believe that the actions of the Federal Reserve (and to some extent Hoover and FDR) made the panic of 1929 into a full-blown depression -- turned something that would have taken a year or three to recover from and turned it into the biggest panic the country has ever seen. That's the Austrian school of economics my friend, and in terms of "growing field" there's a lot of internet libertarians and the like that are "growing" into the field, with Ron Paul as their champion of the anti-FED. However, amongst actual economists, the field isn't taken very seriously, because of many of its adherents semantic arguments (re-defining "inflation" outside of the standard scope, to make their argument) and its ability to ignore lots of contradicting reality. (Like, the fact that no, the Great Depression wouldn't have ended quickly, because Deficit Spending != More taxes, and our debt ratio after WWII was MULTIPLE times our GDP, and yet, our industry was booming.)