Political pork = legalised robbery

Yesterday's Washington Post has an excellent editorial on the recently passed Transportation Bill, focussing in particular on the growth of "earmarks", those pet projects in their districts that representatives include dedicated funding for.

As the Post says,

[the] point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses...Each one of these...amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers' dollars.

I'd go a step further and describe each earmark as a case of legalised armed robbery, of politicians using the state's monopoly on legal force to extract money from you and give it to someone else, not because it serves some common good or higher moral purpose, but for no other reason than they have the power and it is in their personal interests to use our money to buy the votes of their constituents.