Doing Bad by Doing Good

Christopher Coyne's book got me thinking about the deficiencies in all endeavors, not just humanitarian, that fail to use markets to allocate resources. One example is of Boston's Big Dig, which tripled it's initial cost estimate to over 20 Billion Dollars, as badly spent money because it was a poor allocation of scarce resources.  Massachusetts has the wealth to recover from this self inflicted shot in the foot but in spite of the GDP blip this boondoggle created no one could argue it was a good expenditure that provide more benefit then it cost. Our military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are even worse examples of poor return for resource invested.

Paul Krugman's battle with the "Austerians" does not consider government's propensity to mis-allocate resources. For the good of all of us we need less government and more private spending.  The economy currently is handily overtaking government job losses with private job growth.  The sequester is a good thing.