Government corruption

When the government gets involved in anything, it inevibly becomes corrupt and politicised.

That is an unavoidable conclusion and the absolute truth that leads many people to distrust big government, and to try to keep the role of government as limited and consistent as possible.

When government is responsible for something as supposedly innocent as collecting statistics on unemployment, it is tempted to spin the numbers in a positive way. And Obama's job creation / recovery act tries to take credit for the non-existent recovery by tweaking the numbers:

According to a report from a shoe store in Campbellsville, Kentucky, the Army Corps of Engineers “created or saved” nine jobs when it used money allocated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to buy nine pairs of work boots. The Wall Street Journal reports that the store’s owner, frustrated by the government’s confusing online forms, enlisted the help of his 42-year-old daughter, who figured nine—the number of people who would use the boots on the job—made as much sense as any other answer.