• Paul Krugman: The Urge to Purge: "When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage…. Andrew Mellon…. Joseph Schumpeter… “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.” Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness…. How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever…. Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right…. But the Mellonites just keep coming. The latest example is David Stockman…. So what should we be doing? By all means, let’s restore the kind of effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that’s about preventing the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that’s already here, we need monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren’t too deeply indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back. But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump."

Quoted by Brad Delong today.

Yeah I know I've read this before but I've also listened to Beethoven's Ninth before .