Justin Fox is a boon dinner companion and a good writer. He is no friend to banks, and thus I was a little perplexed as I read the beginning of this short essay; but at the end I was almost there with him.

“This is where the Austrians surely have it right. If you are spared the full consequences of your actions, you’re far less likely to learn what you did wrong. That still doesn’t seem like enough reason to justify a do-nothing economic policy in the face of a financial crisis. But it ought to be clear by now that there are also real costs to doing something.”

We are in fact sowing the seeds of the next crisis by not dealing with the causes of the last one. Avoiding the end of the world is not the same as saving the next one.