It’s Worth Seeing Again: The Broken Window Fallacy
This message probably can’t be repeated often enough. There are still hordes of people in our society who share the misguided notion that destruction brings prosperity: they believe when natural disasters, or wars, or terrorist attacks, or government programs to destroy used cars occur, there’s a silver lining because all the money spent to fix [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: 5 – Taxes Discourage Production
Last time we talked about public works projects. They’re often necessary, and fulfill some important need for the citizenry. Large-scale projects, in particular, provide physical, visible, memorable evidence of the results: the Hoover Dam is a fine example of what can be accomplished, as are any number of bridges or other edifices. We also discussed [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: 4 – Public Works Mean Taxes
Last time we reviewed Hazlitt’s discourse on the “blessings” of destruction, and used as a modern-day (and all too recent) example the “Cash for Clunkers” program. Used cars were traded in for taxpayer-subsidized rebates on the purchase of new cars. The ostensible rationale given for the program was “to stimulate” the automobile industry in America [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: 3 – The Blessings of Destruction
The Broken Window demonstrated one of fallacies given by Hazlitt as inadequate economic thinking: taking into consideration only the visible effects of an occurrence, and ignoring the unseen. When the bystanders opined that the baker’s broken window was a blessing for the glass man, they ignored the loss of the shop owner, and what he [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: 2 – The Broken Window
I wrote about two weeks ago of economics and its relationship to what’s going on in the world right now, and Henry Hazlitt’s book Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics. This is an exercise for me to work through his excellent book, and relate it to what I [...]
The Dismal Science and Me: Trying to Understand What’s Going On
I’m intrigued by the dismal science -economics- and its influence (or lack thereof) on current policy and legislation discussions. I liked economics courses in college (I was one class short of a minor); where my classmates saw confusing-looking graphs, and difficult to understand concepts, I saw clarity and sensibility. It seems to me that many [...]
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