All Posts Tagged With: "Broken Window Fallacy"
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
Looking for the unseen effects of economic policy is the beginning of wisdom.
9Feb2012 | Steven Horwitz | 10 comments | ContinuedJapan’s Supposed Silver Lining
The Japanese people are going through sheer horror. To spin this tragedy into economic triumph is not just bad economics; it’s an obscenity.
23Mar2011 | William L. Anderson | 16 comments | ContinuedDestruction Is Good for the Economy?
My old friend Tom Palmer and the Atlas Foundation have produced and posted the first in a series of brief videos illustrating important free-market principles. The first is on Bastiat’s “Broken Window Fallacy.”
31Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedCash for Clunkers Was a Loser
President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program, inspired by the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act, ended August 25, 2009. As I drove through a major shopping area that day, I passed a large and highly successful Toyota dealer. Just past the sparkling showroom and sparsely populated lot of new cars, “clunkers” sat in a [...]
18Nov2009 | Bruce Yandle | 5 comments | ContinuedTaxation as Vandalism
Imagine a small town with only a few small businesses. The best, most prosperous business is the general store, which sells citizens many of their daily necessities. Just across the street is a shop that sells and installs windows. Unlike the general store, the window shop is not doing well at all. The town is [...]
20Jan2009 | Lachlan Markay | 21 comments | ContinuedCommerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons
Edward Stringham is a visiting associate professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. A longer version of this article won second prize (faculty division) in the 2003 Olive W. Garvey Fellowship Program for the Independent Institute and is reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and [...]
1Oct2008 | Edward P. Stringham | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Free Market’s Invisibility Problem
Joseph Packer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Communication. Advocates of liberty face an invisibility problem, first identified by nineteenth-century French libertarian Frédéric Bastiat in the appropriately titled essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Through a simple story, Bastiat exposed the fallacy that later underlay Keynesian economics. [...]
1Apr2008 | Joseph Packer | 2 comments | ContinuedA Government Program for All
My economics students often ask why, if the economic theory I present is correct, there is so much intervention in the economy. It reminds me of an observation made by Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson: It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the [...]
1Dec2006 | Paul Cwik | 2 comments | ContinuedOn Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory
The following piece will not be as abstruse as its title suggests. Rather, it results from the simple observation that, time and time again, some harmful outcome or process commonly attributed to the everyday workings of the market economy actually does exist, but it exists in the realm of the government and politics. Politicians and [...]
1May2006 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | ContinuedDestructive Destruction
If we sound like a broken record at times, it’s because sound economic thinking moves slowly through the culture. Case in point: On September 27, USA Today headlined what its reporter and editors must have thought was wonderful news: Economic growth from hurricanes could outweigh costs.” (At this point Dave Barry would say, “I’m not [...]
1Dec2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Myth of Wartime Prosperity
Whenever an earthquake or a tornado causes great damage, some reporter somewhere claims that on net it will boost the local economy since the rebuilding effort will create jobs and increase business for local merchants. Similarly, whenever a war breaks out, the same reporter can be counted on to emphasize the economic stimulus it allegedly [...]
1Dec2004 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedAll Poorer After the War
No part of the world can become permanently richer by an immense destruction of wealth in another part. Our prosperity is bound up with that of our neighbors. If my neighbor becomes poorer, he will have fewer surplus goods to sell me; he will not be able to spare them; I myself may have to [...]
1Nov2004 | Henry Hazlitt | 0 comments | ContinuedTerrorism Is Good for the Economy?
Following the disastrous attack on New York, Washington, and our country, the purveyors of economic quackery began spilling gallons of ink in describing how they think the tragedy will affect the U.S. economy. One of the most prominent views to emerge, and also the most wrongheaded, is the idea that the destruction of the World [...]
1Dec2001 | Roy Cordato | 1 comment | ContinuedNo Silver Lining
We often see such comments after a hurricane, tornado, or earthquake. I never expected to see it after the horrors of September 11. But there was Paul Krugman, Ph.D. in economics and a New York Times columnist, writing it on September 14 for all the world to see: Ghastly as it may seem to say [...]
1Nov2001 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Is Seen and What Is Not Seen
This excerpt is from the first chapter of Selected Essays on Political Economy, translated by Seymour Cain and edited by George B. de Huszar, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these [...]
1Jun2001 | Frederic Bastiat | 93 comments | ContinuedThe Unseen Costs of Disability Laws
Karen Selick is an attorney in Ontario, Canada, and a columnist for Canadian Lawyer, on which this article is based. Her Web site is www.karenselick.com. Copyright 2000. I first heard of Frédéric Bastiat on graduating from high school, when someone who knew of my plans to become a lawyer gave me a copy of his [...]
1Jun2001 | Karen Selick | 0 comments | ContinuedHurricanes Are Creative Destruction?
My employer, Loyola College, is a Jesuit institution and, as such, encourages its students to participate in myriad community-service programs. In teaching introductory economics, I propose on the first day of class a marriage of economic education and community service. I offer to give students aluminum baseball bats with which they will walk through the [...]
1Feb2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | Continued-
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