The stimulus as the Battle of the Somme

Arnold Kling makes an interesting historical analogy:

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I was reminded of the Battle of the Somme, one of the worst policy blunders of all time. Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was....a really big offensive. Just as Feldstein and Stiglitz pay no attention to the on-the-ground the housing market, the British generals ignored the impact of machine guns on men advancing over open fields.

My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media.

How many people will have meaningful input in determining the overall allocation of the billion stimulus? 10? 20? It won't be more than 1000. These people--let's say that in the end 500 technocrats will play a meaningful role in writing the bill--will have unimaginable power. Remember that what they are doing is taking our money and deciding for us how to spend it. Presumably, that is because they are wiser at spending our money than we are at spending it ourselves.

The arithmetic is mind-boggling. If 500 people have meaningful input, and the stimulus is almost $800 billion, then on average each person is responsible for taking more than $1.5 billion of our money and trying to spend it more wisely than we would spend it ourselves. I can imagine a wise technocrat taking $100,000 or perhaps even $1 million from American households and spending it more wisely than they would. But $1.5 billion? I do not believe that any human being knows so much that he or she can quickly and wisely allocate $1.5 billion.

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The battle of the Somme was a battle that had been in the making since the US Civil War demonstrated that the machinery of warfare had changed the dynamic so that elements that provided combined arms assaults no longer worked giving the defensive a definite advantage. It was not until the development of tanks and airplanes as weapons that the balance was restored. Even after battles like Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and later the charge of the Light Brigade, some still thought sending unprotected infantry into the teeth of machine gus was possible.

Will thowing money at the economy make a difference or will it be just another sinkhole investment by liberals. I suspect the latter.