I admit to a minor amount of Schadenfreude at the way Ireland went from "Tiger" to "Basket Case", and it really does strike me that those countries that so aggressively pursued a boom were the ones that most quickly went bust.

Any sane person knows that capitalist economies are inherently susceptible to boom-and-bust cycles. That's just the nature of unregulated economies, and the United States' own history bears this out many times in the 19th century. It doesn't take reading Karl Marx to realize that the natural response to this would be to build in counterweights and countervailing mechanisms to moderate out the booms and busts, but the typical response of political conservatives has been to put in place mechanisms which enhance the booms and worsen the busts; their avoidance of responsibility is also just as typical, as they blame everybody but themselves and their cronies.