Video: John Stossel's Broken Window Fallacy

Youtube ^ | 8/16/2010 | 20/20

[MichCapCon]

ABC's 20/20 shows how government spending cannot create jobs.

[from occupied ga]

Bastiat was the first to publish this, but it’s still true.

[4rcane]

Cash for Clunkers policy. Spending money to destroy assets

[marron]

Bastiat was the first to publish this, but it’s still true.

Bastiat should be required reading. He's short, sweet, and to the point. You don't have to be a genius to get it.

[Fundamentally Fair]

Cash for Clunkers policy.

A perfect example of the broken widow fallacy.

Was the "cash for clunkers" policy simply the broken window fallacy in practice? 

[4rcane]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnzUViUOTTo&playnext=1&videos=OIpYvdBPN1s
I think this link describe the broken window fallacy better.

[from occupied ga]

Bastiat should be required reading.

Agreed. I wonder how many of the hopey changey crowd ever heard of him let along read him.

[Skepolitic]

Bastiat was the first to publish this, but it’s still true.

Bastiat should be required reading. He's short, sweet, and to the point. You don't have to be a genius to get it. And, you can read Bastiat's most famous work, The Law (1848), as well as his essay on the broken window fallacy, That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, for FREE at bastiat.org and elsewhere on the web.

"Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism."

...

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

[Skepolitic]

"The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it."

Bastiat, The Law (1848)

[from occupied ga]

The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it."

Government hasn't changed a bit in the last 162 years has it?

[Skepolitic]

Well, there’s a whole lot more plundering nowadays.