Robin in Deadwood Forest
20th January 2015
Richard Fernandez provides some inconvenient truth.
Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.
Were Chris Edwards a distinguished economist he would realize at once that pointless activity is the best sort of government activity there is. John Maynard Keynes couldn’t recommend it highly enough. The great economist said that the best use of government effort was to bury money in a deep hole and employ the idled to dig them up again.