Dear Wash. Post: 'Antigovernment ideologues' and Stimulus

Editor, Washington Post

1150 15th St., NW

Washington, DC 20071

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 [1]," 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.