Why we shouldn't print money & mess with interest rates

Imagine two hospitals that declare war on fever. After having tried different things, one decides to simply paint all thermometers to indicate 37°C (100°F). The other decides to give all patients massive doses of fever-reducing medication.

Both of these would of course be terrible ideas: Without thermometers it is impossible to know exactly how much fever a patient might be running, and giving fever-reducing medication to everyone would be even worse since that means depressing the immune systems. Instead of treating the root causes of the patients' ailments they are making everything worse by denying or depressing the symptoms.

Still, this is how we are treating the economy: Banks don't want to lend money, so we then give banks an easy supply to newly printed money. That does not solve the problem.

The real problem is that many people are busy doing work they should not do. Their businesses should fail and new businesses should come and take their place and employ the recently jobless.

That is how free economies work, through creative destruction. With the artificial printing of money (fever reducing medication) and centrally set unrealistic interest rates (painted thermometers), we are just leading people further into a dead end. This will make the eventual re-adjustment so much bigger and more painful.