Remember this: the crisis not long ago was pretty much confined to the housing sector. The fact that these horrible mortgage-backed securities were held by a lot of Wall Street firms did not mean that the entire Street was about to collapse.

Yet, look at how the government has responded. It has jacked up debt by a cool trillion, inflated like mad, and now the disease has spread. The government has taken what would have been a sharp downturn and now turned it into a calamity.

And the government’s solution? Make the calamity an out-and-out depression.