All Posts Tagged With: "Broken Window Fallacy"

Cash 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 | 1 comment | Continued

Taxation 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 | 14 comments | Continued

Commerce, 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 | Continued

The 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.
A young [...]

1Apr2008 | Joseph Packer | 1 comment | Continued

A 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 good [...]

1Dec2006 | Paul Cwik | 2 comments | Continued

On Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory

Joseph Stromberg (jrstromberg@charter.net) is a historian and freelance writer.
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 [...]

1May2006 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | Continued

Destructive 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 Editor The Fr | 0 comments | Continued

The 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. | 4 comments | Continued

What 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 effects, [...]

1Jun2001 | Frederic Bastiat | 0 comments | Continued

Hurricanes Are Creative Destruction? It Just Ain’t So!

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