Round 2

Please, please, please, please quit helping, OK?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that another stimulus package might be needed to help the ailing economy.

Pelosi, whose comments followed a meeting with several economists, said the measures already taken by the Obama administration are helping to restore confidence in the shaky financial markets.

But "we have to keep the door open and see how this goes," the California Democrat added.

I love the folks at Reason magazine -- they're good, decent libertarians -- but I'm starting to think they live on another planet. Their reaction to Pelosi (under the headline "When $1.4 trillion just doesn't get the job done, it's time for stimulation"):

This sort of endless war-gaming, pump-priming, and jawboning, even before earlier rounds of intervention have fully come online much less been proven disastrously ineffective, is precisely the sort of "bold, persistent experimentation" that helped extend and exacerbate the Great Depression.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like a rational person trying to offer a rational reason to a mentally ill person to stop behaving irrationally. But the mentally ill person does not react rationally to a rational suggestion because the mentally ill person is not rational! Get it? Stop talking about these people in Congress as if they're just ordinary, rational politicians who will suddenly realize they have made a terrible mistake when you patiently and rationall explain to them the error of their ways.