Spending Other People's Money

Walter Bagehot noted that 'the most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or harm.' One reason I'm against the increase in government spending is because I find government to be a really bad manager, which is what you should expect when there's no bottom line that disciplines the process. Within a profit-making company hard decisions to fire someone or discontinue some activity are made all the time because of necessity. Without this necessity, these hard decisions aren't made at every level.

Case in point, Madonna put up $11MM to start a school for girls in Malawi. It has been abandoned after they spent $3.8MM on nothing:

"Despite $3.8 million having been spent by the previous management team, the project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, over all, a startling lack of accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United States,” he said. “We have yet to determine exactly what happened to all of that $3.8 million. We have not accounted for all the funds that were used."

At least here, with a direct line between the financier and the project, it was stopped. If it were US federal money it would be considered 'stimulus', and thus a success.