Today’s WSJ has an extremely illuminating article by Gerald O’Driscoll that explains why the Obama (and for that matter, Bush) policy response to the recession (i.e., vast new federal spending they called “stimulus”) is pure folly.

It’s like medieval doctors who thought that bleeding was the remedy for most ailments. When the patient got weaker, the doctor would call for more bleeding. “Stimulus” spending and bleeding are the same: counter-productive remedies prescribed by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

The Obama/Bush economic “doctors” are even worse than the medieval quacks, who didn’t know better and couldn’t have found out the real causes of pathologies in their patients. The administration’s economics wizards have no excuse. The Austrian explanation for the boom, crash, and current moribund condition of the economy is available for anyone to read. Why doesn’t the administration change course?

I think the answers are: it would mean losing face among the leftist failthful, it would mean admitting error (something that authoritarians like Obama never do), the proper policy would work slowly, and since it involves federal inactivity rather than activity, it wouldn’t give the politicians anything to crow about.

We’re trapped in bad policy not because of lack of knowledge, but because of the imperatives of modern politics.