"So the "stimulus" package, a dagger through the heart of the economy, has passed. The geniuses who govern us, who insist that seizing the produce of the voluntary economy and devoting it to arbitrary projects will make us wealthy, have had their victory."
"The primary fallacy of the tooth-fairy economics at the heart of the stimulus is the very idea that economic health is the product of government spending, which is financed either by borrowing (which leaves private businesses with a smaller share of the pool of savings for them to borrow from), printing money out of thin air, or direct seizure from the population. Whatever government spends the money on is necessarily arbitrary -- government lacks the profit-and-loss feedback mechanism that keeps the private sector from squandering resources and employing factors of production in ways that do not cater to consumer wants. It can seize its resources from the people without their consent, and it makes no difference to government whether or not people actually want or wind up using the things it produces. Meanwhile, the economy loses the goods that would have been produced by the voluntary sector had the government not seized these resources for its own use.
The more sophisticated Keynesians, if that isn't an oxymoron, will come back with the argument that while they really do agree with you in cases when the economy is experiencing "full employment," your point doesn't apply when there are "idle resources." In that case, we can "stimulate" those idle resources into action without drawing resources out of alternative employments. These resources currently have no alternative employments.
-it continues but I grow tired at this point- ;) FC