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Whose Ponzi Scheme Is Worse: Madoff’s or the Government’s?
Pardon my humbug this Christmas Day, but how many people have considered that the trillion-or-so dollars the Bush and Obama administrations might spend on bailout and stimulus efforts could turn out to be a worse Ponzi scheme than Bernard Madoff’s fleecing of investors, estimated at up to $50 billion?

Before we rush headlong and panicked into throwing even more good taxpayer money into believing that, yes Virginia, government programs like this actually work, have we looked at the model for all this — similar government “rescue” spending during the Great Depression?

That “New Deal” turned out to be a bad deal. Research by historians including Amity Shlaes, Jim Powell and others has found that President Roosevelt’s expensive Depression-era make-work projects actually coincided with an increase in unemployment and that the projects took years to complete, producing at best minimal benefits to the economy....