Paul Krugman- Who wants a Depression?
One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine. Well, duh, you may say. But, before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.
This was especially true of monetary policy. It’s not that many years since the administration of George W. Bush declared that one lesson from the 2001 recession and the recovery that followed was that “aggressive monetary policy can make a recession shorter and milder.” Surely, then, we’d have a bipartisan consensus in favor of even more aggressive monetary policy to fight the far worse slump of 2007 to 2009. Right?
Well, no. I’ve written a number of times about the phenomenon of “sadomonetarism,” the constant demand that the Federal Reserve and other central banks stop trying to boost employment and raise interest rates instead, regardless of circumstances. I’ve suggested that the persistence of this phenomenon has a lot to do with ideology, which, in turn, has a lot to do with class interests. And I still think that’s true.
But I now think that class interests also operate through a cruder, more direct channel. Quite simply, easy-money policies, while they may help the economy as a whole, are directly detrimental to people who get a lot of their income from bonds and other interest-paying assets — and this mainly means the very wealthy, in particular the top 0.01 percent.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/paul-krugman-who-wants-a-depression.html?_r=0
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I've kind of suspected as much for a while, and I don't know shit. 
It's all part and parcel of the takeover of our government and economic policies by the top 1%. Unfortunately, most of our representation in Congress are top 1%-ers, too. So, in addition to ideology as an obstruction, to fix things they have to vote against what they perceive as their own interests.
Welcome to the 3rd world, America. 
Sometimes, to switch back to your metaphor, the economy is in a situation equivalent to a car resting on an incline, and relaxing the restriction will produce motion. Other times, however, it's not the string of tight money that's holding back the economy. In those circumstances, pushing on the string has no effect.
It's the same basic concept but the older metaphor has a lower carbon footprint.
