That’s what Gene Healy calls Washington, DC. in this Examiner piece.
I particularly like the way he pummels Dave Leonhardt, the economically clueless economics writer for the New York Times. Leonhardt writes that Washington, which gets to spend trillions of dollars taken or borrowed from other people is prosperous because so many people there have college degrees and suggests that the rest of the country could be equally wealthy if only people were “better educated.” That’s one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of the fallacy of assuming that mere correlation implies causation. I have news for you, Mr. Leonhardt, it’s not that putting lots of people with college degrees (and a great number of law degrees) together leads to high productivity, but that when you have a government that extracts vast amounts of wealth from the rest of the nation and spends a lot in the capital, that will attract lots of people who know how to cash in on that. Among that group, those with advanced education are predominant.
