My title’s a bit overstated, but it’s meant to parallel Josh Barro’s “Conservatives Have No Idea What To Do About Recessions.” It’s a stunning and educational essay, so I recommend readers take it in in all its glory. He says it would be “distinctly unconservative… hubris” to believe that “conservative economic policies will prevent recessions,” but he proceeds to enunciate a distinctly liberal hubris.

The basic reasoning behind Barro’s claim about conservatives is that, in the past decade (i.e., for most of his adult life), their economic policy has been the same during boom and bust: “They favor lower taxes, less regulation, government spending cuts, more domestic energy production, school choice, free trade, and low inflation.”

The liberal hubris comes in, first, with the idea that technocrats can use government as the control center to operate the economy like a machine, and second, that a broad policy prescription like “easy monetary policy to raise inflation and support demand” can be prescribed like a general remedy for a head cold. It doesn’t help when they look at the economy only from one economic ridge to the next, rather than the whole range.

In this regard, liberals are merely a mirror image of Barro’s complaint about conservatives. It’s never “feed a fever, starve the flu.” It’s always “compensate for demand gaps,” no matter the underlying illness. The conservative insight is that, for the princes of policy to have any hope of doing no harm, let alone doing any good, they must understand what underlies the problem. And for my entire adult life, that’s been impossible under the layers of government distortions.

For over a half century, by my reckoning, a good portion of our economic growth has been premised on government debt, to the point of addiction. Arguably, the cure for the recession of the ’70s and ’80s wasn’t the Reagan tax cuts and regulatory easing, but the combination of those policies with the continuing growth in government debt — sort of a right-meets-left solution that actually worked for a time.

The problem was that the country never got off the juice. By the end of the decade, the GDP’s benefit from every dollar of new debt was approaching one-to-one. At some point, that boost of money from the future, channeled to productive activity through conservative policies, has to give way. Inasmuch as it would be strange to argue for increased taxes and regulation on economic grounds, the solution is to ease off the debt.

The question of what caused the slowing ROI from government debt and its corollary of what to do about it may not be knowable. At that moment in economic history, it wasn’t worth an extra dollar of investment or hour of effort in order to claim another dollar of debt.

Maybe, at the broad level, the system was sated, in which case the solution might have been social: Taking the gains in quality of life and being content with a period of low growth. Or maybe the economy had no new channels to fill for growth, in which case the solution might have been to encourage a longer-term view, which could have gone hand in hand with the principle of paying off government debt.

Instead, we got the Clinton years, when government policy essentially encouraged people and investors to borrow money from their own future, with the implicit backing of the government if things went sour. It took a decade, but we eventually discovered that it had been a false future founded on the illusion that people who couldn’t afford their mortgages would somehow find a way to do so.

It’s been one feel-good and easy fix after another. So here we are, with the government reinflating the bubble with more debt and printed money. The liberals are claiming that it must continue (indeed, has not been enough), even as conservatives warn of a new pop. And if the conservatives are right, what then?

Eventually realities beyond the reach of columnists’ arguments come into play, and the devastating consequences of some people’s conviction that they knew what to do about recessions will be felt by all of us. One suspects that the geniuses will either find a way to blame groups with ideologies that they don’t like or else magically transport themselves to the other side of the issue.