On the Effectiveness of Government Intervention

One way to measure it would be to look at what happens when the government responds affirmatively to an economic downturn, and to compare that to what happens when the government doesn't respond. And, yes, I am citing specifically here the fact that for the first 150 years of the Republic, the government did virtually nothing to aid in the recovery from a recession (and, yes, there were dozens) and in every instance the economy recovered on its own and in most instances the sharper the downturn the sharper the recovery, and comparing it it to how the economy has stagnated for years when the government has tried to manage recessions and depressions in the 20th Century (more specifically during Great Depression and the current fiasco).......Not that any of these statistics constitutes a controlled experiment, mind you, but it's as close as you're going to get in the study of economics (the depression of 1920 versus the depression of 1929 is an especially compelling study).