Bleeding Washington...

While reading up on the founding fathers I learned that George Washington's doctors literally bled him to death. Washington approached them with a sore throat, who insisted on bloodletting, which made him even more ill, which prompted them to further bleed Washington.

This vicious cycle reached a peak in which Washington lost over a quarter of his blood in one day. To make matters worse, Washington was given a strong laxative and an emetic which caused vomiting. That day America's 1st and greatest president died in agony.

This terrible episode in American history best describes how the interventionist state functions. Very rarely do politicians successfully diagnose the cause of our economic and social ills...especially when their policies caused those very ills.

The "cures" that they propose are often worse than the "diseases." But, just like with Washington's doctors, the failure of their "cures" compel them to declare that the solution is to further administer them.

Any Chicagoan can tell you that even as spending has soared, our public schools have remained awful, with a graduation rate of approximately 50%. Yet the solutions are always the same: more spending and greater federal involvement.

And of course we encounter this problem with our current economic crises.

Clearly government involvement was one of the major factors in the formation of the housing bubble, yet so many politicians and their pundits declare that the market is the illness and even more state intervention is the cure.

Massive debt and irresponsible spending in the public and private sectors were key factors that contribute to our economic ills, yet Bushbama proposes even more spending, which will lead to even more debt.

What irony - in 1799 Washington was bled by his incompetent doctors and in 2009 Washington bleeds our great nation.