Contrast And Disconnect

Some politicians make lots of noise about how we shouldn't be in the business of nation-building, and that government just fucks it all up whenever it tries to do something to help straighten out a tough economy, so we should just sit tight and let nature take its course, etc. But somehow these are usually the same guys who're in favor of borrowing billions of dollars and sending that very expensive money to places like Iraq and Afghanistan in attempts to build those nations by investing in their markets and beefing up their infrastructures.

Why do we keep votin' for these guys?

US can't account for $8.7 Billion.

The failure to properly manage billions in reconstruction funds has also hobbled the troubled U.S.-led effort to rebuild Afghanistan. About $60 billion have poured into Afghanistan since 2001 in hopes of bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to the crippled country.

The U.S. alone has committed $51 billion to the project since 2001, and plans to raise the stakes to $71 billion over the next year — more than it has spent on reconstruction in Iraq since 2003.

An Associated Press investigation showed that the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good. The number of Afghans with access to electricity has increased from 6 percent in 2001 to only about 10 percent now, far short of the goal of providing power to 65 percent of urban and 25 percent of rural households by the end of this year.

As an example of the problems, a $100 million diesel-fueled power plant was built with the goal of delivering electricity to more than 500,000 residents of the capital, Kabul. The plant's costs tripled to $305 million as construction lagged a year behind schedule. The plant now often sits idle because the Afghans were able to import cheaper power from neighboring Uzbekistan before the plant came online.

-and-

War is Theft (Juan Cole):

The reason is that in the chaotic days after the fall of the Baath government and the collapse of the old economy, Paul Bremer & Co. attempted to jump-start the Iraq market economy by giving out large sums in brown paper bags with no questions asked. They did not understand that the Iraqi market had been killed by decades of government control and that no magic hand any longer existed, so they might as well have taken that money and buried it in the ground. (Actually some of it probably was buried, in back yards in Fairfax County, Va.)

So maybe these two instances seem to illustrate the viewpoint of "conservatives" that
'government is bad', but of course, those same "conservatives" never say that the Military part of the government sucks - it's just all those civilian bureaucrats blah blah blah. Anyway.

Now we get to sift thru a little controversy over dueling estimations of how the Bush Bailouts and the Obama Stimulus either have or haven't saved us from an even worse outcome here at home. Intervention Helped Avert a 2nd Depression is an article in NYT that describes a study by a couple of econ brains.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.

The article (of course) includes a quote or two from a guy at The Hoover Institution who questions their conclusions - he's "surprised" at their findings. Imagine my surprise at his being surprised.  And imagine my surprise that NYT felt the need to find somebody to disagree with the Blinder and Zandi article.

There's something really unhealthy about all this. It's like we're all in this defensive crouch, and that our default mode is Counterattack. We have to figure out what our shared basic assumptions are, and then we have to start getting back to them before our little experiment in self-government blows up in our faces.