"I don't recall reading about any mass withdrawals in 2008." - There weren't any bank runs in 2008, but there have been before that (Thus proving that one company can, in fact, tank the economy) 2008, like 1929 and unlike 1837/1893/1907, was a market crash, not a banking crash.
"Notice how the recoveries from the panics of 1837, 1893, 1907 you mentioned were all much quicker than both the great depression and the current recession, when Keynsians made the policy." - I'm sorry, but you really couldn't be more wrong on the history here. The whole reason the Great Depression was so bad is because after the market crashed, the Fed raised interest rates and tightened the money supply, so that by 1933 the amount of money in circulation had dropped by 35%. This is the exact *opposite* of a Keynesian approach. (Even Milton Friendman - about as far from a Kenysian as you can get - pinned the blame on the Fed's contractionary policy in his A Monetary History of the United States. Ben Bernake, whose entire academic career centered on studying the causes of the Great Depression, famously apologized to Milton Friedman in 2002 on behalf of his predecessors, admitting that they made the depression much worse by using a contractionary approach) Futhermore, in 1936, as the Great Depression was starting to turn around, Congress began cutting back on New Deal spending, and the economy went into a double-dip.
"I think if you let them go through bankruptcy, sell off the good parts of the businesses, and discredit/fire the bad actors, within a year you'd have recovery. " -- That's a bit like saying that if the car that hit us had been going 30 mph faster, we'd have had a faster recovery. You think bad companies should have been left to fail, so you're rationalizing that letting them fail would have made the economy bounce back faster. It's wishful thinking. The truth is in 2008, when the CDO market froze (thus, under the mark-to-market accounting rules, rendering all CDOs worthless), if the government hadn't stepped in and started buying them, a huge chunk of wall street would have gone bankrupt. In turn, all of their subsidiaries would have shut down. People would have gotten laid off, and in turn would stop spending. Aggregate demand would have plummeted. More businesses would have gone under. It's much more likely we'd be facing 25% unemployment (instead of 11%) and a 10+ year to recovery (We're only in the fourth year of the current recession but it's starting to look better) It's already happened once (the great depression) and you haven't made any case for why it would be any better this time around. (In fact, since the economy is much more integrated and interconnected, it would almost certainly be far worse today than the Great Depression)
"I don't think the Fed should have been created, and I think we should still be on the gold standard" - yea, that's the problem there. Monetary policy might not be perfect, but the idea of abandoning it and going back to the gold standard is like saying that drills hurt, so we should abandon modern dentistry. Frankly, it's silly.