If you want a short course in economic thinking whereby you will learn to quickly parse anything someone says about stimulating the economy or directing it read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It is short, plain English, and was required reading for my 4 children, once in middle school and again in High School. Now, as young adults when they are tempted by some Utopian scheme their brains automatically go into if-then mode and they see the economic fallacies and do not get sucked in. Making your kids read Hazlitt's simple book is pretty good insurance that they will not get co-opted by University utopianism even when they get intellectually rebellious. That dataset installed in their brains will bring them back to earth.
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
-~~Ludwig Von Mises
Or you can send them to Hillsdale College where my son goes to learn the Austrian School of Economics as espoused by Von Mises and Hayak. Gov’t is not the solution and the more they interfere, the worse the consequnces will be and the longer the economy will take to recover. One only read Dr. Folsom’s (Hillsdale prof) book which came out last Feb., titled “New Deal or Raw Deal?” to see the harm FDR and his New Deal did to the economy and kept America in a Depression.
One quote in the book from FDR’s Treasury Secretary says it all. Henry Morgenthau (who was FDR’s Treasury Secretary and closest confidant) blows all of the liberal arguments out of the water. On May 9, 1939, with unemployment at 20%, speaking to the House Ways and Means Committee Congress, Morgenthau said “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong...somebody else can have my job. I want to see the country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promise....I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started....and an enourmous debt to boot!”