As governments around the world keep throwing money at the "financial crisis/recession, there is a lot of talk on how we must get consumers and business borrowing again, that we must get credit markets "operating normally" again.

It occurs to me that perhaps operating normally is not what we need or want. Didn't normal credit operations, with consumers and commercials borrowing more than they could ever pay back get us into this mess in the first place?

Maybe if we allowed credit to tighten, and people and businesses had to save up for things before being able to buy them, that savings mentality would carry over to the government - and we could start to climb out from under the $11 Trillion in debt we have in the USA (that's about $36,000 per person in the US).