From a Letter to the Editor in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Brief and brilliant.

Regarding your editorial "Gaza's Terror Economy" (July 26): When promoting deficit spending by governments to alleviate recessions, John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that it didn't matter if the government paid people to dig holes in the ground and then paid them the next day to fill them in.

I always found that a bit troubling and consulted my macroeconomics colleagues. "Wouldn't it be better if these workmen actually built sewer systems?," I asked.

The reply was: "Well, yes. Some infrastructure improvements would be good. But Keynes's point was that you stimulate demand for shovels, the workers have enough money to buy bread so the baker is lifted out of recession and so on." I noted that this system only works if the baker sets up a hole-digging charity or if the government confiscates some of his income from baking bread and donates it to the hole-diggers.

How sad that Hamas has been trying the ultimate Keynesian experiment, paying able-bodied workers to dig holes in the ground. Too bad that this has been funded by well-meaning foreign aid.

One can only wonder at the result if one-tenth of this effort had been directed into building schools and, yes, sewer systems.

David Robinson

Oakland, Calif.