I just spotted the worst U.S. Census ad yet. Several D.C. buses now sport huge ads on their sides that read (approximately — I’m doing this from memory), “If we don’t know how many people there are, we won’t know how many buses we need.” Yes, you will. A business knows about supply and demand. If operated as a business, Metro would know how many buses it needs without the census. But, increasingly, we’re an allotment society. The ad betrays the way bureaucrats, drawn to central planning (namely because they get to do the planning), think.
POSTSCRIPT: I hope that, at some point, someone does an analysis of where and how the Census spent advertising dollars. I suspect that we’ll find it spent most of its money in places that the Democrats want to be populated and less in places they don’t.
Internet Scofflaw 