A reader calls this the “most bizarre form of make-work bias I have ever seen,” and I have to agree:

NAJAF, Iraq — At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Can anyone doubt that we should dream of a world where every grave digger, corpse washer, and shroud seller loses his job?

HT: Josh Hendrickson