Ezra Klein just (inadvertently) admitted republicans are right.

In a post critiquing James Pethokoukis' recent article in Commentary magazine (analyzing whether or not the stimulus worked, or in fact made things worse), Mr. Klein makes an admission.

The Bernstein-Romer calculations were conducted in December 2008 and released in January 2009. In December 2008, the Bureau of Economic Analysis was projecting (pdf) that in the fourth quarter of 2008, the economy would contract at a 3.8 percent annualized rate. That would later be upgraded to 6.2 percent, and then, earlier this year, to 8.9 percent. In other words, Bernstein and Romer were building their estimates — and their policy — off numbers that underestimated the economic contraction in the fourth quarter by 5.1 percent of GDP. And they weren’t alone. Every private-sector forecaster — from Macroeconomic Advisers to Moody’s to Goldman Sachs — was making the same mistake. In December of 2008, no one had any idea how bad things really were. Indeed, we didn’t really know the depth of the damage until a few months ago, when the BEA updated its estimates.

In other words...

In the fourth quarter of 2008, our economic inputs were wrong. So forecasts using those inputs to make predictions about the future produced answers that were also wrong.

Now, Mr. Klein is hardly the first liberal pundit to make this admission, nor will he be the last. I can't recall having ever before read someone claim that, because the administration was working with faulty numbers, they shouldn't be judged too harshly for putting together a faulty package, but that is actually beside the point. There is a much more subtle admission here, one that I think Mr. Klein would vehemently deny in most other contexts: even when filled with an array of intelligent, experienced, highly-qualified experts, the government basically had no better idea what is was doing than you or me.

That assumption, that government fails not because of stupidity, but because of good-faith ignorance, is the essence of conservatism. The economy is simply too massive a thing to be closely tracked in real time, and without that accurate data government cannot effectively direct its resources towards productive ends. Only by putting purchasing power into the hands of individuals, who are closest to the infinitesimal transactions that aggregate into the full economy, can you hope to jolt it into action.

Certainly, the government can do some things: massive spending will of course lead to at least some money being put to productive use. But it also tends to lead to lots to money being wasted, which is the other dramatic flaw with the stimulus that Mr. Klein et al. seem unwilling to contend with. Money wasted on unprofitable green energy initiatives or Indian Casinos is a disgrace to begin with, one that no one has ever effectively extricated from the political process. But it's also a vacuum sucking money away from more productive uses.

Even if one accepts that stimulus was, in some measure, necessary to the economy, it's hard to believe the one that passed is even remotely acceptable.