Is there anything wrong with a little pork barrel spending?

Last week, a member of Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, actually defended the way that Congress does its business. Give him credit for originality.

Rather than the usual refrain of blasting Washington as a dysfunctional and corrupt city, Reid disagreed with President Barack Obama and said: "I have been a fan of earmarks since I got here the first day. I disagree -- underline, underscored, big exclamation mark -- with Obama. He's wrong." He opposes the ban on earmarks that Congress put into place three years ago following the Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections.

Earmarks, historically referred to as a form of "pork-barrel spending", are measures that House and Senate members add to bills to benefit people in their own districts. 

In response to Reid's comments, there was the predictable backlash of criticism. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, warned that "The American public think it's a sick way to run a business, to have to bribe somebody to get something done and politicians use it to look good at home." In The Wall Street Journal, Coburn pushed back against calls to bring back a little pork by writing, "restoring earmarks in today's Congress would be like opening a bar tab for a bunch of recovering alcoholics." ...