Kling's two points, as I see them, are this: first, if a solution doesn't work, the same solution in greater amounts won't likely work either. Second, why do we think that any one of the "experts" would have the wits to handle spending the billions of dollars that is being called for.
On his first point he says:
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 [the "experts" in his article] 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.As I see it this has been brewing and bubbling for years. The "free market" gets blamed every time something goes wrong, but it was government meddling that creates many of the problems. So the calls for more government spending to stimulate the economy is wrongheaded. Let those who make the financial mistakes pay for them. Let the people help that want to, and leave the rest alone.
On his second point he says:
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.
I will only add one of my favorite quotes from Hayek: "All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest."
