Let me elaborate a little bit on the mindset of the interwar years - which was truly quite different than that of today. Keynesianism looked much better than it does now and people were very, very worried about the future of the American dream. Look at how many sided with Hitler or Stalin. In this context let me ask you to elaborate on your statement
and in fact both countries would have faced economic disaster at some point anyway
and what you would have done had you been in Hoover's or FDR's shoes.
...and in a truly dreadful manner created a market (if you can trivialize razing a city as "creating a market")...
It may be truly dreadful but far too often this is the manner in which markets are created. See my earlier post about the Black Death.
To return to today. Nobody deals well with economic contraction, failure, eviction, starvation, etc. Priming the pump obviously has a down side. Safety nets are a function of prosperity. They disappear when the going gets really tough. The contention that downsides will be short and sharp sans government intervention seems to me about as reliable as the contention that war will be short and victorious. I am not persuaded that anyone - anyone at all - has a real grasp on what makes the economy tick.
We agree 100% there, that's for sure! All of what economists do is only a mental model after all, and I've seen cases made that the economy is what is termed an "unsimulatable system" - a system no model less complex than the system itself can accurately reproduce. I'm beginning to believe it.