Fools in command

Harvard study shows earmarks cost jobs

Nobody is smarter than the market, but plenty of fools think they are. The Obama administration's "stimulus" debacle is only one more sad, costly example.

While we commend the Harvard researchers on their scholarship, we can't say we were surprised by the study's findings. You don't have to go to Harvard Business School to see that federal pork distorts the free market with unintended and unpleasant consequences, so encouraging more federal spending is bad economic policy. It is time Washington woke up to that fact.

In fact, going to the Harvard Business School is no help at all -- the Harvard authors describe their own results as "an enormous surprise." It just never occurred to them.

And good luck with waiting for Washington to wake to how markets work. Here's a prediction: Obama and his ilk are too stupid to EVER wake up to that. Might as well try to teach the multiplication tables to a pig. That's a bad analogy, really, because a pig knows he knows nothing about arithmetic; the people we're thinking about think they know something, but what they don't know is that everything they think they know is wrong. When they somehow get into public office, the results are what we are seeing right now -- awful.

Byron