1 What's the opposite of progress? Congress. 

2 David, the best humor is the most truthful.

If approving a federal budget is Congress' "most important function", shouldn't taxpayers demand that Congresspeople have economic expertise? Almost half of Congress consists of lawyers. Understandable, since lawyers by definition are legal experts, and Congress makes laws. But how many Congresspeople have expertise in both economics and law? What does expertise mean?

I define expertise very broadly as simply knowing specific inputs that produce certain outputs. That is, if you do X, Y will happen.

The world is one gigantic economics lab. Has Congress studied it? Do they understand what Y will result from X? What if X is a 2,000-page health care bill? What if the input is so massive that it is beyond human comprehension? This is the danger of socialism. Incomprehensible input times elite decisions in the name of the people equals disaster. Capitalism empowers the individual to make decisions based on smaller amounts of data that he can understand. There will always be error, so we must aim for error reduction, not error magnification. The state is the ultimate error multiplier.