Our Incompetence Means You Can’t Do Anything

Via the Sultan of Shrill, the comedy stylings of Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy:

This package is partly based on the belief that government spending is required to stimulate the economy because private spending would be insufficient. The focus on government solutions is particularly disappointing given its poor record in dealing with crises in the US and many other countries, such as the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and failure effectively to prosecute the war in Iraq.

You’d think that their very first example wouldn’t be 1)an obviously necessary government function that 2)was the province of an agency that functioned at a very high level until George Bush got a hold of it. But apparently not. I trust that the Iraq example speaks for itself (although perhaps at least he no longer thinks that the cost of the war is being overstated. Perhaps he’s also abandoned his belief that attacking a country that had no connection to 9/11 and posed no significant security threat to the United States lessened the risk of a terrorist attack against the United States.)

And as a bonus, savor their example of the horrors that await us should the Bush Depression lead us to more state intervention:

Similarly, the backlash against capitalism and “greed” has been used to justify more antitrust scrutiny, greater regulation of a range of markets, and an expansion of price controls for healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

Yes, it certainly would be horrible if this crisis meant that the United States adopted one of the health care systems of other liberal democracies and therefore got more coverage for less money with similar or better health outcomes. I’m very, very scared.