why do people routinely believe that productivity and solvency can be commanded by wave of a politician’s magic wand?

and the creation of "politically controlled money is exactly what the South fought to prevent -- yes huge ironies and paradoxes involved

http://papermoneycollapse.com/2011/10/the-second-crisis-of-socialism/

After 40 years of government-controlled money, this is the result.

This crisis is the inevitable outcome of the dangerous belief that low interest rates, and investment and lasting prosperity, can be had via the short cut of money printing, and its twin sisters, artificially low lending rates and never-ending bank credit creation, rather than the time-honoured hard way (and capitalist way) of saving and true capital formation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMTyKduYrUk

This is not a crisis of capitalism. My good friend Brian Micklethwait coined a much better phrase for it: This is the second crisis of socialism. We are witnessing the demise of the paper money standard, 40 years after the global fiat money system was freed of its last link to gold, and money everywhere became simply an unchecked territorial monopoly of the state. What we are now finding out is this: the state and the banks need a straightjacket or they will sooner or later drag us all into a black hole.

Why is this system socialist?

There are two ways in which a monetary system can be organized: either the market chooses what is money, or the state does.

The money of the free market, of capitalism, has always been commodity money that is outside of political control. Wherever the trading public was free to choose, it picked commodities of fairly inelastic supply as monetary assets. Almost all societies, throughout all cultures and civilizations, have come to use precious metals as money.

Commodity money is apolitical money. Nobody can create it at will and use it to fund himself or to manipulate the economy. Crucially, human cooperation via trade does not stop at political borders, and commodity money has always transcended such borders. If gold was money this side of the border, it was usually equally money on the other side, regardless of whose image was printed on it.

Image by FreeDigitalPhotos.net

By contrast, complete paper money systems that have no link to an underlying commodity are always creations of politics. In such systems, money can be "printed" at essentially no cost and thus practically without limit. But not by everybody. Money printing is the privilege of the state and its central bank. Money, in this system, is entirely elastic. But it is political money and closely linked to political authority.............

for further context>>  http://dixienet.org/New%20Site/quovadis.shtml