19 November 2009

Where Are The Stimulus Jobs?

3 comments:

Jenny said...

Merrill Field had a WPA... pardon.. Recovery.gov sign up for a while and now has nice shiny new big ol' electronic gates where the taxiways intersect the road. Don't know if there's a connection, but if there is...

... Hazlitt's Broken Window shatters again.

Rev. Paul said...

Jenny, I'm always impressed when someone displays a well-rounded knowledge of history, although in your case I'm not surprised.

Perhaps the 'broken window' lesson wouldn't apply if the stimulus money were created by the .gov. But since they only took it from the citizenry to begin with, it's a zero-sum game at best. At worst, it means someone else went without so that the airport could buy a gate.

And the "worst" case scenario is most likely to apply here.

Jenny said...

Thank you kindly. :)

You know, it wouldn't be so bad if they actually went about it the New Deal way. Now don't get me wrong, it would still be *bad*, but at least from what I've been able to gather they at least made the effort to get you to do something nominally productive before cutting a check in those days, and some of those infrastructure projects were if not free market wonders at least useful.

(Or rather, the useful ones stuck around while the "dig a ditch and fill it in again" projects are long forgotten by now)

But if we're gonna go into massive debt to Do Stuff, it would be kind of nice if the goal of the project was to build something useful instead of "ooh! Free Money!"