You don’t say.

NEW YORK Reuters – Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged on Tuesday that some waste is inevitable in the spending of a $787 billion economic stimulus package, in a characteristically blunt assessment.

“We know some of this money is going to be wasted,” Biden said during a roundtable discussion in New York with business leaders aimed at promoting the two-year stimulus plan.

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Biden said transparency and accountability are key to the programs success.

“There are going to be mistakes made,” said Biden. “Some people are being scammed already.”

Huh.

I wonder what his point is.

Because if it is to show how wasteful and inefficient anything run by the government tends to be, he’s doing a fantastic job.

What incentive does a gargantuan, leviathan government have to suck up the capital of its citizens in an economical fashion? Without wasting? To take only that which it needs? None. A body without regard for waste, who simply sucks more when it runs low has no incentive whatsoever to spend wisely, to track inventory or to conserve.

A private citizen with limited resources, however, is forced—FORCED—by the laws of simple economics to allocate his resources where they are most efficiently used. If a private citizen loses $500, $5,000 or $5,000,000….he feels it. Because his resources are not unlimited, and because he spilled his own sweat to create that money, he has an incentive to avoid that loss by limiting risk, enacting measured responses to events and conserving.

Not the government. If through waste, “scamming” or mistakes, it loses millions or billions of dollars, they can either print more money or simply suck up some more from taxpayers. They don’t create that money from their own effort and thus there’s no incentive for them to conserve.

No incentive to conservation.

Keep that in mind as you listen to Biden and the rest of the Obama Administration explain their takeover of American private enterprise.

They’re doing things with your money that you wouldn’t do with it yourself.