If you're flying an airplane in good trim and you don't know what you're doing, you're better off barely touching the controls instead of pushing buttons at random or shoving the yoke all the way forward.

Some talk show hosts have been darkly speculating about deliberate leftist plans to wreck the economy and make us easier to control. I don't agree. As the saying goes: "never assign to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."

I believe the people pushing the buttons in the Washington cockpit have no frigging clue how an economy actually works, or where the wealth is generated. Or if they do, they choose to suppress the knowledge to keep their worldviews intact. Sadly, this ignorance is not confined to one political party.

The financial crash was not the result of a system operating on its own. It was the result of years of government attempting to manage the mortgage system, including insulating financial groups from failure, forcing bad loans, and holding interest rates at unrealistically low levels to increase economic growth. By short-circuiting market forces at several levels they created opportunities for unscrupulous financiers to game the system without penalty.

Any government mechanism designed to prevent financial failures from occurring no matter what is not a good idea. What would normally be a series of small, painful (and politically distressing) corrections gets saved up for a nice, big crash.