“Two West Coast senators are leading an effort to increase the number of cross-country flights out of [convenient but overcrowded] Reagan National Airport, a move that could lead to more noise over neighborhoods and jam already filled parking lots,” reports the Washington Post.

Sens. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) have amended a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill to allow up to 20 additional takeoffs and landings a day.

“It’s about connecting West and East Coast economic centers,” said R.C. Hammond, spokesman for Smith, elaborating on the senator’s motivation for the amendment.

Actually, Washington isn’t really an economic center. It’s more like an anti-economic center. Washington doesn’t do business, it impedes business, and subsidizes business, and regulates business, and cripples business. New York, Baltimore, Atlanta — those are East Coast economic centers. Not Washington, the city of lobbyists and government contractors.

Just what is it that businesspeople from Seattle and Portland would come to Washington for They’d go to New York and Atlanta to make business deals. But they’d come to Washington to lobby for subsidies, or for regulations on their competitors, or to try to get a piece of the $2.9 trillion federal budget. But not to do actual wealth-creating business in the marketplace.

Some people say that West Coast senators want direct flights from National Airport to their home towns to make travel more convenient for them. If so, they should say so. But don’t tell us that the country would benefit from more Lobby Express flights.