Lew and Bill: Kudlow and the Reason Foundation are quite correct in seeing government (i.e., taxpayer) funding of projects as “innovative” and profitable. All we have to do is accept the principle – long in the ascendancy in the business community – that profits should be privatized, while costs are socialized. This is the thinking that sends professional sports-team owners, shopping center developers, factory owners, etc., to local governments urging the use of eminent domain and government subsidies to socialize as many of the costs of doing business as they can rationalize to city council members and their boobeoisie constituencies. Socializing costs is just being “neighborly,” Obama tells us, while socializing profits would, as we know, be “communistic.”

There is an endless supply of “innovative” solutions to social/economic problems I could come up with if I could force others to pay the costs of implementing them. Of course, the real costs are, as Bastiat reminded us, the opportunity costs foregone. And if I am to innovate such solutions – at your expense – isn’t it only “right” that I keep the profits for myself? How could you be so selfish as to deny me my reward? What shall we call such a program? Let us honor the foundation that seems so attracted to such thinking and paraphrase the title of an old book: “none dare call it reason!”

The Best of Butler Shaffer