To the Editor of the Wall Street Journal: The substance of former GOP Congressman George Nethercutt’s defense of Congressional earmarks is as contorted as is the language he uses for this defense – for example: “Allowing earmarks provides an opportunity for constituents to advocate to their members for accountable federal spending in their districts or state” (Letters, November 28).

In light of the difficulty of making sense of this indigestible word salad, one can only guess at Mr. Nethercutt’s meaning. My guess is that he’s asserting that – compared to Congress as a whole and to the executive branch – individual members of Congress, using earmarks, spend money more wisely in their districts or states because these members have more intimate, local knowledge of the needs and opportunities of the people there.

This claim about local knowledge is likely true, but it doesn’t support the case for earmarks. Instead, it supports the case for lower taxes, less spending, and smaller government. If money is spent most wisely by people with the most precise and reliable knowledge of the diverse needs and opportunities in each of this country’s many different locales, then each private citizen, in his or her own individual household or firm, is far better able to spend money ‘accountably’ than is any politician working in Washington. As my friend Frayda Levin said years ago in response to her senator’s similar defense of earmarks, it’s absurd for taxpayers to “send money to D.C.” and “then have to spend resources finding a sympathetic ear who can … understand local needs.”

* * *

To the Editor of the Wall Street Journal: The subheading describing Alan Blinder’s essay “The Unsettling Mystery of Productivity” (November 25) reads “Since 2010 U.S. productivity has grown at a miserable rate. And no one, not even the Fed, seems to understand why.”

Here’s a potential explanation: regime uncertainty. Pioneered by economist Robert Higgs to explain the length and depth of the Great Depression, the concept of “regime uncertainty” captures the difficulty of investors to foresee how their rights to their property (including to their profits) will be affected by government policies. A rise in regime uncertainty reduces productive, private-sector investments – and a consequence of reduced investment is slower productivity growth.

Economists at Stanford and the University of Chicago measure “economic policy uncertainty” — a concept quite close to regime uncertainty. Data on their website go back to 1985. The average level of U.S. economic-policy uncertainty from 1985 through 2009 is 101.1, while the average level of such uncertainty from January 2010 through October 2014 is 140.7. That is, the average amount of uncertainty (as measured using data found on the website Economic Policy Uncertainty) since the start of 2010 is nearly 40 percent higher than during the preceding 25 years.

Whether or not this heightened uncertainty explains the slowdown in productivity growth, such intense uncertainty cannot possibly be good for the economy.

* * *

To the editor of the Baltimore Sun: Misleading language, faulty economics, and failures to connect the dots saturate Robert Reich’s essay “The growing wealth and clout of the richest .01 percent” (November 21).

He misleads by writing that “the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold more than 11 percent of the nation’s total wealth.” In reality, though, there’s no such thing as the nation’s wealth. Wealth is created by, and belongs to, individuals. And overwhelmingly, the more wealth an individual creates – by producing, in cooperation with others, goods and services valued by consumers – the wealthier that individual becomes. Yet Mr. Reich’s wording suggests that wealth exists independently of individual creativity and initiative, and that it rightly and originally belongs to “the nation” rather than to each of the individual men and women who create it.

His economics is faulty when he describes this wealth as being ‘held,’ as if it sits idly. Yet the great bulk of this wealth is invested in productive enterprises that make consumers and workers better off even as it makes its risk-taking owners better off. This wealth is not in safes or mattresses.

And Mr. Reich fails to connect the dots by complaining that the rich spend more and more of their wealth in the political arena. What else to expect when that arena becomes ever more central to Americans’ daily lives and, simultaneously, becomes ever more crowded with redistribution-mongers (such as Mr. Reich) whose squeals to soak the rich grow louder and harsher?

* * *

To the Editor of the Washington Post: David Ignatius proposes that climate change be treated “as a moral issue – a matter like civil rights” (“The moral issue of climate change,” November 19).

This comparison fails. The core concern that sparked the civil-rights movement was simple: government-mandated racial segregation and discrimination wrongly prevented each African-American from pursuing his or her life’s goals on equal footing with white Americans. Neither the existence nor the baleful effects of such barriers was ever in doubt. In addition, destroying these barriers was both a relatively straightforward procedure and, by any remotely acceptable ethical standards, unambiguously the right thing to do.

Climate change is completely different. Legitimate debate continues over the magnitude of impending temperature change and – despite the predictions of the novel that inspired Mr. Ignatius’s call for a moral crusade against climate change – debate continues over the likely consequences of any such change. Legitimate debate also rages over the effects of government efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Ending Jim Crow simply got government out of the way of peaceful human interactions — interactions that build civilization. In contrast, empowering government to address climate change complicatedly puts government in the way of market interactions — interactions that have generated what Nobel economist Edmund Phelps calls “mass flourishing” on a scale unprecedented in history. Given governments’ dubious record of intervening into economies — and given free markets’ impressive record of raising the living standards of ordinary people and of adapting to change — to fuel government efforts on the climate front with moral fervor would be a grave and dangerous error.

Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.