Dear Wash. Post: 'Antigovernment ideologues' and Stimulus
Editor,
Dear Editor:
E.J. Dionne suggests that only "antigovernment ideologues" doubt that "If governments around the world, including our own, had not acted aggressively - and had not spent piles of money - a very bad economic situation would have become cataclysmic" ("Why We Didn't Crash," August 24).
He's mistaken. Earlier this year three Nobel laureates along with nearly 350 other professional economists - employed by institutions such as Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Rutgers, UCLA, and the National Bureau of Economic Research - signed an open-letter contesting the alleged need for stimulus spending.* Of course, Mr. Dionne might accuse these economists of being antigovernment ideologues - an accusation that, should it be made, would demonstrate only that Mr. Dionne is a progovernment ideologue.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Don Boudreaux is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a Business & Media Institute adviser.
Like this article? Then sign up for our newsletter, The Balance Sheet.
