Conservatives and Sewers (Is One More Full of Shit?)

This short Paul Krugman column from a few days ago is worth quoting in its entirety:

I see that some commenters on my traffic externalities post are speculating what Republicans would say about sewers if they didn’t already exist. Well, we don’t know about Republicans, but we do know what The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system:

Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.

Sewers are socialism!

It wasn’t until the Great Stink made the Houses of Parliament uninhabitable that the sewer system was created.

(I added the link to "the Great Stink" -- and it's a fun read -- the others are in Krugman's original at The New York Times.)