At first blush, the Biden administration’s dedicating $450 million of newly approved infrastructure spending to improving and unclogging U.S. ports sounds like a good idea.

After all, we’ve seen the pictures of hundreds of ships waiting at the Los Angeles port for weeks to be unloaded. Port improvement may turn out to be a good idea. But we should be wary of politicians responding to an artificial surge in port activity — a surge that they inspired by spreading trillions of newly printed dollars throughout the economy.