First there was the Mercantilist school (get the gold, no matter what)
which was superseded by the Adam Smith classical school (you can print
money, but you probably should keep 20% gold or silver in reserve), and
then there was the Jefferson/Jackson school: damn banks altogether,
but let the people do as they want, only throw their asses in jail
if their money is ever shown to be no good.

These have evolved into:

    1. the classical Smith/Hamilton scheme
    2. the libertarian Jefferson/Austrian account
    3. the monitarist Friedman/Chicago school
    
Finally in late 2004 I. M. Korbanovich proposed the Chaotic Turbulent
Model. In this account, economic progress parallels progress in 
individual lives, whereupon it is seen that the greatest factor
retarding progress is stability. (Keep in mind that in fluid mechanics
turbulent flow moves a liquid at a much faster rate than does laminar
flow.)

The Chaotic school holds that fiscal uncertainty, the hopes of a 
quick buck, and a constant stream of bankruptcies with full scale
boom/bust cycles is essential for maximal economic and societal
progress.

Example: If financial insolvency occasioned by the possession of
a lot of worthless banknotes had not forced Moses Austin into
bankruptcy, then he never would have moved to Tennessee, nor would
his son have colonized Texas. These rash adventures were undertaken
by desperate people. With a sound monetary system (either by strict
adherence to a gold standard or by some stabilizing agency such as
the Federal Reserve) the U.S. would have remained a quiet Atlantic
seaboard community mired in comfort and tradition.

Fortunately, however, Hamilton's careful planning was destroyed
by Jefferson, and the Jefferson/Jackson plans were in turn ruined
by the lax banking laws of the several states. Even though the total
chaos of the hundreds of different kinds of currency was unfortunately
done away with in 1857 by adoption of a single national currency,
government mismanagement and unrestrained speculation still brought
repeated financial panics in the later years of the 19th century.
America has never before or since experienced such growth, innovation,
and progress.

Just as going away to college disrupts the comfortable lives of
teenagers, forcing them to break all their old habits, so too an
economy, according to the Chaotic theory, must be broken of its
habitual comfortable routines. This object can only be achieved
by monetary and financial chaos, injecting the maximum amount of
entropy into people's lives and enterprises, thereby forcing the
people to be ever on the lookout for new opportunities and new
ways of doing things.

Just as a Silicon valley engineer who is repeatedly fired or laid-
off maximizes his experience and skills by working at a variety of
related jobs in an atmosphere of fear, exuberance, despair, glorious
windfall---and above all, uncertainty---so too must constant 
turmoil and destruction of settled routine maximize a nation's
advancement. There is no better example than American history:
progress greatly slowed in the 1960's as the effects of the last
great disruption of the early forties wore off.  Within just two
generations, the much older staid economies of Europe and Asia
for the first time in history gained on America's, and no longer
fell further and further behind as always they had before.


This does not, however, solve the main problem. After all, 
people will never choose progress over comfort, even when, as
now, their very lives depend on it (anti-aging, life extension).