Other than a few obvious and self-evident truisms, like the law of supply and demand, economics is not physics, it is more like engineering, it is a human artifact. We're not talking about blind forces here, we are looking at the social relations human beings adopt in order to organize themselves to provide the things they need to survive. They change historically both because of changing conditions AND conscious decisions by people. Things are the way they are because we made them that way, whether by accident or deliberately. We are allowed to fiddle with the system when it stops working for us. The real question is whether should those who currently benefit from the system be the only ones enabled to decide.

I'm not going to try going into theory(the "physics."). I'll just warn you against confusing natural ecological systems with farming.

The results of comparing planned economies with free economies over the past century or so are self-evident. You wouldn't think anyone would need any other evidence, but so appealing is the idea that political power can force prosperity that this never sinks in.

The built-in flaw in the idea of a "managed economy" is that it isn't about who should be able to decide how to control the lives and wealth of others, it's that anybody should at all. In the former case, the power will always end up in the hands of a "favored" few--the rulers, the gentry, the nomenklatura, the "czars," the Party. It always has. The idea that the system can somehow be "engineered" into perfection is part of the problem.

I'm curious that nobody seems to wonder what would happen if the state didn't step in to try to "correct" every twitch in the economy--usually in a ham-handed manner. We have developed vast state institutions and legal arrangements since the Great Depression that were intended to make sure the economy never goes out of whack again. They don't seem to have accomplished this, have they? Maybe the answer isn't more or different regulations?

We used to believe that all fires in the wilderness were bad, and even small ones were immediately extinguished. The results were an accumulation of huge amounts of burnable material that eventually went up in a forest holocaust, killing trees that would survive smaller blazes.

It might take a huge economic "fire" to bring things back to stability again. Then maybe a realization that cycles, even looney "tulip craze" cycles, are a natural part of the deal. A forest untended by human beings has many small fires, but the forest survives.

Of course, there's no political power to be had in that kind of thinking, so we move on to more regulations which, like all the rest of them, will owe more to politics than good sense. "This time for sure, Rocky."