Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog also writes for Forbes, and today his new article “Why Keynes Was Wrong” appeared.  Warren said, in part:

Rather than attempting to make investment easier, almost all government stimulus efforts to date have focused on trying to better optimize how and where investment capital is deployed. The core assumption behind all of these programs is that a few people in government can invest money more productively than the private entities from whom the government took the money.

After doing a quick reality check on how businesses make investment decisions, which is that they have a ton of very specific information relating directly to their business in order to make the best investment decisions possible–as opposed to government where that vast quantity of specific information is unavailable to bureaucrats not intimately involved in a business or business sector, he says this:

In their hubris, however, the Congress and this administration believe they can do what even the most successful corporations can’t. They take money away from individuals and businesses, either in the form of taxes or borrowing that squeezes out private capital, and claim to invest that money better than would have those individuals, despite much worse information and inferior performance incentives.

The whole article is well worth reading.

It seems to me that the solutions to actually creating jobs and prosperity is so obvious that it’s unbelievable that every soul in Washington isn’t shouting it: Reduce regulation (instead they’re increasing it), reduce taxes (instead they’re threatening increases and spending at a rate that almost guarantees they’ll do it), give the markets, business people, and entrepreneurs some sense of stability on which to make decisions (instead they pass 2000 page bills with all manner of unintended consequences necessarily built into them, and creating bureaucracies with undefined roles so no one knows what is coming next).

These people in Washington, who don’t seem to understand business at all, keep putting themselves in the way, all the while proclaiming that they’ve got the answer.  Here’s the answer: Get out of the way!