“Booms and busts are here to say,” you say in passing in your main leader about the economic crisis one year on (“Unnatural Selection,” September 12, 2009).  This would be a heresy fifty years ago, but you are surely right.  The only thing that has changed over a century or so is the cycle length, though.  Once upon a time, when markets were hardly regulated, it took between three and four years on the average.  With massive regulation, the cycle has stretched to between four and five times this long, but both booms and busts are much more pronounced than before.  More regulation appears to bring us ever closer to catastrophe.  Thus there is a case for less rather than more regulation.  For what could be wrong with short cycles?  Schumpeter’s creative destruction cannot possibly work when destruction is nigh total.