Martin Wolf offers up a really nice piece of economic thinking. It might be helpful while we try to dig ourselves of of our ideological train wreck. Take comfort in the fact that the wisdom is a little fuzzy around the edges. Bright lines are rarely drawn in exactly the right place.

If you want to get a step closer to the origins of some of Wolf's thinking read John Maynard Keynes' The Great Slump of 1930, found here. This short treatise reads frighteningly like a description of the current slump.

The argument about the need for government stimulus of the economy is over. We now argue about how to spend the money. We would do well to remember, as Keynes did, that in the first instance, this is a technical problem. Whatever solutions are chosen, whatever moral imperatives we believe in, whatever other goals those solutions aid, they must address the very amoral needs of the technical problem.