Last week, former Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee had a piece published in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the federal government isn’t spending enough to restore prosperity. Today’s edition has a group of reply letters that make him look foolish. Here’s a good one:
Mr. Goolsbee fails to acknowledge that the underlying structural cause of the recession directly relates to excessive government spending. It isn’t simply the fiscal ramifications of debt growth exceeding GDP growth by so much. It’s the taking of resources from the private economy which allocates them fairly efficiently and gives them to the government which misallocates them via misguided wealth redistribution policies, through the subsidy of unviable industries or just plain cronyism.
Economics is no longer the objective study of the efficient allocation of resources, but rather the subjective financial justification of a political and social agenda.
Nicholas Pandelidis
York, Pa.
