A guy who smokes meth can pull a week of 15 hour days. But come next week… .

That’s how artificial “incentives” work on the economy. On the macro level, it is the Boom — and Bust — business cycle, whose unnatural peaks and valleys are caused by manipulation of money and credit, which causes excessive and unwarranted “investment” that — inevitably — leads to a downturn (or even a crash) when the artificially induced supply is disproportionate to demand. The housing bubble of the early 2000s is an obvious example of this.