The Only Good Crowding-Out Argument

I was pontificating earlier today about how many of the now-unemployed Financial Services workers were, in a previous life, engineers of one stripe or another, and if we’re going to be doing things with the stimulus bill such as re-engineer the power grid, some of them may well decide to return to their previous life. And with a 60% increase in the number of people unemployed since May of 2007, there should be some decent competition.

Leave it to my old friend Terry Bisson to completely undermine that argument:

I think the big Wall Street bonuses are a fine idea.

Without them, Wall Streeters will all look for other jobs. Do we really want these greedy incompetent clowns building our houses, teaching our children or driving our cabs?