In last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, economist Roger Meiners had an enlightening piece that focused on just one of the vast number of “stimulus” projects the Obamacrats have given us — an investment in solar panels for a fish hatchery in Montana.
Professor Meiners points out that the panels would take 70 years to recover their cost — but are expected to last 40 years at most.
Would any business owner make that investment? Would you put your own funds into a certain loser?
No, but, Meiners observes, “Since the feds are footing the bill, no one will walk away from this turkey. Nevertheless, we will pay for it. Or, more accurately, our great grandchildren will pay for it, since this piddly little project is part of the trillion-dollar deficit that we are unloading on future generations.”
Exactly.
“No one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own,” Milton Friedman used to say. That explains why the more heavily politicized a nation becomes, the less efficient its economy becomes: political decision-making crowds out the more rational private decision-making. That’s why the Soviet Union was an economic basket case. That’s also the direction Obama is taking us.
