Famously Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist #1:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
One sees this notion echoed frequently amongst the Founders. The problem of democracy, history and experience taught them, was not that democracies acted too slowly, but that they acted too quickly, without reflection and choice.
Tomorrow, apparently, the House of Representatives will begin debate on a bill that nobody has read. An agreement made behind closed doors without Republican input (there goes that vaunted bi-partisanship) will be debated only hours after having been made public. It's almost like they don't want anyone to know the content of the bill they are voting on.
We must get the bill passed quickly, we are told, because the situation is so dire. But as James Glassman argues, the history and current economic consensus regarding the stimulus effect of fiscal policy suggests the impact of this bill will be minimal. Glassman's piece is a tour de force. Read the whole thing. Here is the summation.
Stimulus—that is, fiscal intervention with the express purpose of speeding up the normal regenerative process that Grant describes—is unnecessary and almost certainly harmful, a policy based on hubris and anxiety, rather than on history and good sense. Under such circumstances, the proper way to analyze discrete proposals today for spending or taxing is on their own merits, not on their supposed ability to stimulate something else. There may, in fact, be a good reason for government to spend billions of dollars today on building highways, and it has nothing to do with stimulus. It is that long-term interest rates are at historic lows and that the right highways can boost the economy in the long term. There also may be a good reason, again far apart from stimulus, for revising the tax code and reforming Social Security and Medicare. It is that Americans now understand that the economic future is not so assured as they believed a couple of years ago, and it is time for decisions to be made—in a manner careful, sensible, and unstimulated.
Update: From Sundries Shack:
It is now 7 PM and the Democrats in Congress have yet to give their Republican counterparts a copy of the final Stimulus Bill for them to read. Steny Hoyer says that the House is going to move toward a vote starting at 9 AM tomorrow.
Today’s version of the bill clocks in at 1,434 pages and that’s not the final version. What Congress will likely vote on tomorrow (because President Obama has practically demanded that he sign it on Monday) is likely going to be larger.
There is no chance in the world that any member of Congress is going to be able to read the bill by morning unless they are a trained speed reader. Even then, they’re not going to know the full ramifications of what the bill contains.
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