Waste Is Bad, M-kay?

Matt Steinglass breaks with Krugman:

I’ve been waiting for the moment where I have a conservative-ish disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy in this time of crisis, and this seems to be it. Wasting money on government programs is bad, not just because it’s wrong to spend people’s tax dollars in ways that don’t maximize the return, but because in the long run it damages the effectiveness of government. If you want to destroy a government agency, or a regional government tout court, walk in, hand them a bunch of money and tell them you don’t care how they spend it. Within a couple of years of that, you’ll have a government agency that is no longer capable of performing its mission when it has to. And this isn’t just true of government; it’s true of any kind of organization when it’s made unaccountable.