The empirical evidence strongly suggests that the answer is: "HELL NO!!"
Brad DeLong, 2011:
The Anatomy of Slow Recovery: [A]s long as aggregate demand remains low, we cannot even tell which pieces are right side up. New investments, lines of business, and worker-firm matches that would be highly productive and profitable at normal levels of capacity utilization and unemployment are unprofitable now. So, what America needs now is not just a recovery in demand, but also structural adjustment. Unfortunately, the market cannot produce a demand recovery rapidly by itself. And it cannot produce structural adjustment at all until a demand recovery is well under way...
John Maynard Keynes, 1936:
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: Whilst... the enlargement of... government... in the task of adjusting... the propensitv to consume and the inducement to invest, would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism, I defend it... as the only practicable... condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative....
[I]f effective demand is deficient, not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros, so that the players as a whole will lose if they have the energy and hope to deal all the cards. Hitherto the increment of the world's wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough...
Yet more evidence that I would be a smarter man if I simply wiped existing programs and data structures from my wetware and installed a John Maynard Keynes emulator...
