A quick prediction about the upcoming State Of The Union address

Tuesday, January 28th, The Idiot will give another State Of The Union address.  I can't decide if I'm going to drunkblog it or not. 

Most of what he's says will prove him guilty of this economic fallacy:

Hide and watch.  The man has never created a dime of wealth on his own, he's never grown anything, never created anything that he could trade for your money except a storybook of his own glorious life. 
As a lawyer and as a politician, Obama's career choices have been in fields that are about taking things by force - through the courts or at gunpoint. 

Wait and see, wait and see.  

30 Anti-Libertarian Fallacies

Someone named Max Borders at the Foundation For Economic Education came up with this list of anti-libertarian logical fallacies. 

Mr. Borders knows his stuff.  In fact, I've scraped it, just in case the Foundation For Economic Education goes bankrupt or the site disappears.  (This fallacy is also known as "The Blogger You're Reading Is A Lazy Bastard, And Ripped Off Another Writer".) 

Mr. Borders lists 30 logical fallacies that are often used in arguing against the libertarian philosophy.  You'll have to go here to see number 30. 

You already know what it is.  You've heard it a hundred times. 

1. Argument ad KochBrotherium: This fallacy is a cousin to the genetic fallacy and guilt by association. The twist, of course, is that anything that the Koch Brothers ever say, said, fund, funded, might fund, came close to funding, could have funded, will fund, walked by, looked at, support, think about, or mention is invalid by virtue of, well, “Koch Brothers! Boo!”
    
2. The Unicorn: You’ll recognize this fallacy from the question, “Why does no libertarian country exist anywhere in the world?” Embedded in the question is the assumption that libertarian countries don’t exist because they are fantastic creatures, like unicorns. Of course, just because something doesn’t exist yet does not mean it can’t exist. Indeed, the Internet in 1990 and the American Republic in 1775 beg to differ. And the unicorn fallacy fundamentally confuses the libertarian worldview with some “L”ibertarian platform that might be the product of some electoral processes—processes most libertarians reject. Michael Lind and E. J. Dionne have brandished this fallacy rather shamelessly, and have had it parried rather effectively by better minds.
    
3. Nut-Picking: This fallacy has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. In this style of argument, the arguer finds the kookiest or most insane person who self-identifies as libertarian and then ascribes all of that person’s beliefs or claims to all libertarians. (This one could also be called the Alex Jones fallacy.) This is a tough one to counter simply because there are plenty of nuts to pick from, and plenty of them use the l-word.
    
4. Must Be Scared/Have No Answer: This one’s pretty simple really, and a unique creature of “debate” via social media. The libertarian leaves his computer or signs off for a while and the opponent accuses the libertarian of not being able to answer his or her FB claims, which the libertarian simply never saw or had no time to answer.
    
5. The Tin Man: This fallacy was identified and named by Cole James Gentles (here) who inspired this article. With the tin man the arguer either concludes or falsely assumes that the libertarian “has no heart” because she argues against some favored policy. 
   
   This cousin of the straw man (scarecrow) fallacy assumes a direct line between sympathies and outcomes. Any failure to support some means amounts to a failure to support the wished-for end.
   
   
   The tin man fallacy is rooted in the assumption that one’s opponent, often a libertarian, has no heart. Unlike the straw man fallacy, in which the debater needs to mischaracterize their opponent’s position, the tin man fallacy allows the debater to build a sturdy-looking, if hollow, general facsimile of their opponent’s position (“You are against state mandated universal health care?”), but not give him a heart (“Then you don’t care about poor people who don’t have access to affordable, quality insurance, or people with pre-existing conditions!! You heartless monster! WHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR?!” Heard that one before?)
    
   The frightening part of this fallacy is that its wielder usually thinks exitus acta probat.
      
6. Availability Cascade: Something big and bloody happens on the news (or goes viral) so the arguer implies or concludes that it’s a widespread occurrence.
   
   Example: A mass shooting has occurred, which points to an epidemic of gun violence.
   
   It’s not clear that if gun violence is at a multidecadal low point, the incident reflects an “epidemic.” The ready availability of some story leads one to conclude that a problem is widespread and demands a drastic response. Cass Sunstein, known for his work on “nudging,” gets credit along with Timur Kuran for identifying this phenomenon. (An availability cascade doesn’t always have to involve specious reasoning, but it very often does.)
    
7. Man on the Moon: Remember Rachel Maddow standing in front of the Hoover Dam? She’s trying to convince her viewers that the government (which she calls “the country”) must tax and build some major make-work project in order to revive the economy (or whatever). Maddow is employing a form of the man on the moon fallacy, which takes the form, “If we can put a man on the moon, we can do X.” But it misconstrues any reservations about big, awe-inspiring State projects as doubts about “America’s” ability to do big things. It’s just assumed that anything requiring extensive collaboration must be done via State power for it to count. Questions of the value, cost, or feasibility (or some combination thereof) of any particular project are sealed off from the word “if.” And of course “we” is never carefully unpacked.
    
8. The Gap: I wrote a whole book about why the following involves fallacious thinking. The fallacy goes something like this: “The free market widens the gap between rich and poor.” Now, strictly speaking that claim might be correct. But so what? I’ll pass over the problem that the “free market” has probably already been attacked with the unicorn fallacy at some prior point in the same hypothetical conversation. In any case, because economies are dynamic, the “rich” and “poor” change from day to day, and measured in quintiles, we don’t know whether the “gap” will be greater or smaller from one day to the next, even assuming a free market. The real problem with such reasoning is the built-in assumption that a gap itself is a bad thing. Suppose a really tall man moves into my neighborhood. Apart from my suddenly wishing I were taller, does the presence of the tall man make me worse off somehow? Of course not. The existence of the rich person doesn’t make me worse off, either, unless he got rich by using political means to transfer money from my pocket to his. This happens all the time. But such transfers have nothing whatsoever to do with free markets.
   
   Measuring an asset gap in and of itself tells us little. Indeed, without the functional story of how any gap came to be—stories, not snapshots matter here—we can’t make any judgments about it whatsoever. “Gap” talk is just a fetish that ignores how much better off the poor are thanks to the existence of innovators and entrepreneurs who got rich by creating value. And the unstated assumption is that if any group of people has more wealth at any particular point, the people with less are somehow being wronged simply because the other group has more. The gap fallacy is also meant to preempt debate, usually in the service of another agenda (which is rarely more than reinforcing the opponent's opinion of himself as a good guy).
    
9. The Two-Step: Some opponents will simply change the subject in the middle of a discussion, leaving the original claim by the wayside. Usually neither party notices the two-step. For example, the opponent may refuse to answer the libertarian’s direct question and instead respond with another question. Or the debater may slide into one or another irrelevant point that has no bearing on the original point at issue. This process can go on for a while unless the libertarian rigorously brings the opponent back to the original point. The red herring, ad hoc and non sequitur are similar enough fallacies, so the two-step may also be classified as an evasive tactic.
    
10. Panglossian Fallacy: Because the military-industrial complex was somehow involved in developing aspects of what later became the commercialized Internet, it follows that government funding is indispensable for such wonderful things to appear—and that all the things that go along with the funding (and revenue-collection) apparatus are therefore also acceptable. This variation of the post hoc fallacy is seductive particularly because we can never know what would have happened in the counterfactual private sector. Form: If it happened, it must be the best of possible worlds. (See also the “The Government R&D Canard.”)
     
11. Your Side: Also known as tarring with the same brush, this fallacy has a couple of related forms (see No. 1 and No. 3). An opponent may accuse the libertarian of being a Republican or Tea Party conservative because he or she happens to agree with a majority of Republicans on some particular issue. One hears: “Your side thinks . . . ” when in actuality the libertarian doesn’t have a “side” per se. It works even better as a tactic if there is really no connection at all apart from being something the opponent’s “side” would never say. The “your side” fallacy allows the opponent to appeal directly to tribal biases, which are more immediate and powerful than any argument. When it’s intentional, this rhetorical maneuver is meant to appeal to others who may be watching—the hope being that they’ll swerve into the ditch that is their own biases.
     
12. The We/Society Fallacy: This common form of hypostatization occurs when the user ascribes rational individual agency to “society” and conflates or confuses society with the State. Both usually happen immediately, or somewhere hidden, before the opponent even speaks. The opponent wants his moral position or emotional state to be reflected somehow in the organization of society.
    
     Although “we” or “society” is a useful ersatz word that appears to confer legitimacy on some aspect of the opponent’s claim, it is almost always an intellectual sleight-of-hand. Only individuals can act. Groups must work through processes of either collaboration or coercion. (Note: “The market” is often misused this way, by both supporters and detractors.)
     
13. Deus ex Machina/Market Failure: People is people. And yet opponents sometimes think that it’s enough to argue that governments, by dint of largess and force, have the power to fix certain kinds of problems, which they label “market failures” because they happened outside the purview of State action. Note that this only works in one direction: Problems in any area covered by the State are usually chalked up to being problems merely of execution, whereas “market failures” allegedly reflect an inherent deficiency. Even if one agrees that one set of people working in voluntary cooperation cannot solve some problem (or at least haven’t yet), it does not follow that another group of people—“the government”—can. Indeed, greats like James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have given us very good reasons why government is not likely to solve problems and will likely make matters worse.
     
14. The Organic Fallacy: Such arguments take the form, “It’s organic therefore it’s good or good for you.” Or similarly, “It’s not organic therefore it’s bad or bad for you.” One hears this rationale to demand regulations and food labeling. And while there may be independent reasons to justify such regulations or labeling, these are not justified by the organic fallacy. It’s not clear that Socrates would argue for the health benefits of natural hemlock, nor would people with thyroidectomies argue they should go without Synthroid. I would add that, until there is more evidence to the contrary, there are plenty of GMOs that are good for me. (Note: Plenty of libertarians commit this fallacy too. Just because Monsanto is a rent-seeker doesn’t mean all its products are bad.)
     
15. Nobel Fallacy: You may recognize the form “X has a Nobel Prize in economics, who are you to argue against his claims?” I don’t care whether Krugman or Stiglitz has a Nobel Prize, they’re wrong about just about everything.
    
    And the truth or falsity of one’s claim doesn’t depend on his credentials. (Meanwhile Nobel Laureates James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, Elinor Ostrom, Douglass North, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek are mostly always right. I mean, that’s like 6–2 for the good guys. [*rimshot*])
     
16. No Parks for You: Snarkier opponents of libertarianism rhetorically ask why libertarians avail themselves of all the goods and services government happens to provide. “If you’re going to live by your principles, you can’t use X or Y” (insert: state universities or public roads). Of course, it does not follow that one should not avail himself of some good or service he thinks should be provided by other means.
    
    Indeed, one could argue that he is more than justified in consuming some good or service he has been forced to pay for against his will.
     
17. The Self-Exile Fallacy: Snarkier still is the opponent who argues that “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?” Implicit in this question is the suggestion that there is some positive duty for one to leave a condition he doesn’t like and/or that by one’s staying, he his implicitly consenting to whatever the system is. By this “logic,” if you have just bought a house with an ‘80s bathroom, instead of improving, changing, or upgrading it, you should just take a bath in the kitchen sink.
     
18. Somalia: Opponents love to tell you that Somalia must be a “libertarian paradise.” Everyone laughs. If you respond with a phrase like “comparative institutional analysis,” everyone’s eyes glaze over and you lose, despite being correct. Somalia has been better off on most dimensions without a central government than it was under a brutal, centralized regime—warlordism notwithstanding.
     
19. Social Contract: Rousseau left a terrible intellectual legacy. And progressives use his “social contract” to justify anything under the statist’s sun.
    
    Of course, there could be a real social contract, but libertarian opponents prefer the one that allows them to justify anything under . . .
     
20. Start Somewhere: You’ve slogged through the data. You’ve offered a completely rational response. You’ve explained the ins and outs of why your opponent’s policy X won’t work and why it may even make things worse. The response? “We’ve got to start somewhere.” The idea here is that it’s better to do, well, anything—even if it might result in calamity. And, of course, the State must do that potentially calamitous thing. (See also No. 23.)
     
21. Social Darwinism: “The free market is just social Darwinism!” This is actually a pretty old meme. It was used by progressive academics in the 1940s to smear the work of Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a biological Darwinist to be sure. And he also thought the market and social phenomena like institutions and ideas would be subjected to analogous evolutionary forces. But the unit of survival in markets is the business, not the individual. In other words, businesses that fail to create value for customers die. But advocating for free people to engage in voluntary exchange is not advocating people leave the weak, poor, or vulnerable to suffer.
    
    Quite the contrary. Most advocates of the free market believe a robust philanthropy sector is part and parcel to a system of voluntary exchange. Herbert Spencer thought so too. He writes: “Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.”
     
22. Argumentum Ad Googlum: This fallacy proceeds when the libertarian makes a good point or builds a stellar case, or asks a question the opponent can’t answer. The opponent disappears for a while frantically Googling away. The opponent comes back with a series of links that stand in for argument. To be fair, this isn’t always a fallacy, as some will use links to support their claims. But often the tactic is used to thrust the burden of debate back onto the libertarian who is expected to read through the links and infer some point. At best, it’s bad form.
     
23. We’ve Got to Do Something!: Related to the “start somewhere” fallacy, “We’ve got to do something!” is an argument that really means (a) the State has to do something, and (b) State action is preferable to both no action or private action. Numerous examples of this fallacy appear when opponents think any action riding on good intentions is good enough, consequences be damned. Often, however, it can be demonstrated that it is better for government to do nothing and to stop doing what it’s already doing. (Examples include stimulus spending, regulation, and other forms of intervention.) For government to do nothing is rarely presented as premise subject to debate and evaluation. Someone genuinely open to ideas would ask, “What should be done about this?” and “Who should do it?” Someone genuinely interested in answers would have the courtesy to make explicit what they already believe: “The government has to do something, which is beyond debate. Here’s what I think that something should be.”
     
24. Empirical Fallacy: A familiar opponents’ refrain of late is: How do we know X isn’t going to work until we try it? We have to wait and see the empirical evidence before calling X a failure. With such reasoning we should let monkeys go to Washington and type randomly into a big machine that spits out statutes at random. Well, we already do this in a manner of speaking, but it might be a good idea to look at some well-established economic theory and economic thinking before sallying forth into legislative adventures that could have both predictably perverse and unintended consequences. More importantly, the opponent presumes it is the prerogative of the State—and, by extension, any governmental group within the State apparatus—to experiment on those under its auspices, and that it is the duty of the subjects in that jurisdiction to submit to the experimentation. (Also called the Pelosi Fallacy.)
     
25. No True Libertarian: Ever heard of the No True Scotsman fallacy? Usually it’s applied by someone in a group to question another’s membership in that same group in terms of their ideological purity. Libertarians are famous for saying to each other “If you think X, you’re no libertarian.” But libertarians’ opponents use a variation of this, too. They’ll say something like “Libertarians believe in X. If you don’t, you’re no libertarian.” (X might be natural rights, collective non-State action, a social safety net, etc.) The No True Libertarian fallacy is a way of trying to force the libertarian to choose between a subtle variation in his argument and his own doctrine. It implies the libertarian lacks credibility: “This clown doesn’t know what he thinks!” Of course, such a tack has no bearing on the truth or falsity of either party’s claims, or the validity of their arguments. Libertarianism is a diverse school of thought. It is not a monolith. One need only demonstrate the consistency of his argument.
     
26. Fascist Ignorance: This one should be familiar: Libertarian opponents were outraged—OUTRAGED—when John Mackey pointed out quite correctly on NPR that Obamacare is a fascist policy. Fascism is, of course, a doctrine that calls for significant State control over private industries, to be carried out in the service of State ends. So the fallacy of fascist ignorance is a form of ad hominem in which a libertarian opponent refers to the libertarian or his views as “fascist” despite, strictly speaking, holding fascist views herself. (One might also refer to this as the “Chicken calling the cow ‘poultry’” fallacy.) In the interests of good discourse, however, it’s probably not wise for anyone to evoke the power of the “F” word at all, given how much baggage it carries.
     
27. Just One Life: The emotional appeal, grounded in nothing substantive, is meant to be a moralistic shutdown card. It goes “I’m sorry, but if we can save just one life with this policy, it’s worth it.” What does that even mean? Does it mean that every life has infinite value? Does it mean that saving lives at the expense of others and all other considerations is the purpose of government? Or does it mean that “worth it” is completely vague, but you just care a lot? It’s a heroic-sounding sentiment, but it demonstrates only the speaker’s commitment and earnestness—not any analysis of the policy itself.
     
28. Consensus: This hybrid of the bandwagon and appeal to authority fallacies infects lots of discourse. It takes the form, “Lots of really smart and educated people believe X, therefore it’s true.” From the USDA food pyramid dieticians to macroeconomists, authorities are not always right.
    
    There are limits to any individual’s Fability to understand all the nuances of a given issue. Prediction and forecast are even more difficult. Political decision-makers must confront the same exact same cognitive limitations as mere mortals, which is why they, like libertarian debate opponents, rely far too heavily on expert “consensus.”
     
29. Logo-phallo-euro-centric: Opponents accuse libertarianism of being hostile to women, minorities, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups. The fallacy lies in the idea that if your doctrine doesn’t acknowledge that groups deserve special, State-sanctioned treatment at the expense of other groups or individuals, it’s tantamount to some ism. Some even go as far as to say that if you use certain language some construe as racist, sexist, or homophobic, it invalidates libertarian doctrine. While many libertarians act like idiots and should probably not overreact to collectivist PC victim narratives with foul language, libertarian doctrine is at root a doctrine of anything peaceful—voluntary cooperation, decentralized power, and radical community formation. The heroes of libertarianism (of all races, sexes, and ethnic backgrounds) knew that collectivism and Statism are interdependent world views: It takes evoking collectivism and inventing group rights (or wrongs) to justify most State actions, and the State has historically had the power systematically to prop up or tear down people by group.
       
30. You'll have to go here to read #30.  Heck, the guy went to all that trouble to make this list and you need to send him some traffic!!

The Most Persistent Economic Fallacy Of All Time

Here's the late, great Milton Friedman, explaining the difference between money and production, and then production vs spending.

Can you spot the economic fallacy?

I watched some Fox Bidness Channel blabbering yesterday a.m.  The host had two guests: a gent named David Callahan from the Demos think tank, and economist/actor Ben Stein from the world of reality. 

They were discussing the Bush era tax cuts.  Stein noted that during the four years after the tax cuts were implemented, tax revenue increased and that we had record-breaking amounts of tax money rolling into the Treasury.  (Thomas Sowell has also noted that the percentile who received the tax break then paid more $$ in taxes afterwards, and also paid a higher percentage of the total taxes.  If people don't have to give the government as much money, people can then invest their money in things that aren't stupid or harmful and that eventually creates benefits for everyone.  The government eventually gets more money.)

Callahan disagreed.  He stated that there was a four-year period in the Clinton era where taxes were a higher percentage of GDP than ever before, and that tax revenue was near 20% of GDP during that era. 

Let's assume that Stein and Callahan are both correct.  More dollars, adjusted for inflation, came in after the Bush tax cuts.  But a higher percentage of taxes to GDP came in during the Clinton era.   

Who has a legit point, Stein or Callahan? 

Apples that didn't fall too far from the tree

If you are entertained by this type of thing, you can see an earlier post on Jackson by going here. 

If you want to know more about the history of the Luddites (and Jesse Jr is a Luddite of the worst possible sort), then here's a video that was produced for middle school history classes.  Can someone who isn't busy today e-mail this link to Congressman Jackson? 



A fresh coat of Whitening to The Swash for the video. 

A final (imported) nail in the Locavore coffin

You might remember the "Locavore" movement, the anti-growth/anti-globalism folks who want to mandate that we supply ourselves within spitting distance of our front yards, or some such silliness.  At one time they were proposing legislation that required grocery stores to show how many "food miles" each product had travelled. 
Yeah.  Seriously. 

Yes, I guess you could grow oranges in Fort Worth, Texas, but they would have bigger carbon footprints than Al Gore's mansion(s).  And they would probably be so crappy that the producers couldn't get any economies of scale in their orange shipments.  I could go on and on, but there's no point in it. 

Here's another argument against the Locavores by Tim Worstall.  I found it on Samizdata:

Take local food. So, if everyone in North-Eastern Japan were to be reliant upon local food supplies then everyone in North-Eastern Japan would now be condemned to starvation in the next month or so. Not just the ten or twenty thousand who have already died, but the hundreds of thousands, millions, that make up the entire population. For in the wake of an earthquake that destroyed much and a tsunami that swamped the rest, there is no food, no saved food storage and no damn chance of growing any for the forseeable future.


"Localism” would kill all of these people. And the same would be true of localism in Pakistan when it floods, Queensland when it floods, Cockermouth when it floods, any damn where when there’s a drought and, in fact, any part of the planet that could be hit by any of those natural disasters which a vengeful planet can plop upon us, from the flood and drought already mentioned through to hurricanes, cyclones, potato or banana blight and plagues of frogs.

Think about any place suffering from a famine.  Famines happen when the local food supply doesn't come through, and the locals haven't been allowed to trade with neighboring (or faraway) nations. 

Ok, but what about the disruption to supply chains?  Haven't we all read about how Toyota plants in the U.S. and other a few other automakers are having to shut down assembly lines because they relied on Japanese parts? 
Wal-Mart figured that one out a long, long time ago.  They have a minimum of two suppliers for everything, just in case one of them goes broke, gets hit with an earthquake, a tsunami, or gets too uppity.  Within a couple of years, every one of Japane's major customers will have done the same. 

So good riddance to the Locavores.  If they had their way, I would be stuck eating local Texas barbeque. 

If you've got a few more minutes to kill, go here to read an account of a Locavore in British Colombia who drove all over town in a damn SUV to pick up food to serve at a locally-grown meal designed to get neighbors to turn off their floodlights.  I don't think he meant that part of it to be funny.  These are nice people, but they don't understand economies of scale. 

On our addiction to foreign oil

I was flipping channels a couple of days ago and heard someone blathering about ending our dependence on foreign oil.  I don't remember who it was, but it might as well have been John McCain....



Or Jimmy Carter....



Or anyone else who is trying to scare voters into supporting oil company subsidies or throwing money to Green Energy scams.  (Yes, oil company subsidies and Green Energy scams.  The players all wear different uniforms, but they're playing in the same game.)



These guys always speak of our "addiction to foreign oil", but never say a word about our addiction to foreign computers, wine, cheese, electrical components, iPhones, televisions, fabrics, jeans, suits, or that inexpensive mouse you're using to make my words move up and down on that foreign screen in front of you.  They try to give the impression that the lines of latitude and longitude of factories and warehouses should be your most important shopping criteria.   

They never acknowledge that those of us living in Fort Worth, Texas, have a higher quality of life because we trade our goods and services (the things we're best at doing) with people who live in Waco, Texas (for the things that they're best at doing). 

Texans often trade with people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Some of the people in Arkansas have funny accents.  Some of the Oklahomans look like Indians.  And despite Texas being an overwhelmingly Protestant state, we can hold our noses and swap our stuff with the Catholic natives of south Lousiana. 

I'm considering trading with Memphis Tennessee for BarBQue, since Texas BarBQue sucks.  The Texas stuff is made from cows, not pigs. 
Should that be anyone's decision other than mine? 

We trade with Canada.  We swap lots of our stuff for their timber. 
We trade with Mexico.  We swap lots of our stuff for their clothing and auto parts. 

Yes, we rely on people from those other strange cities, states and nations.  But guess what?  They rely on us for our goods and services, and they also rely on us as.....customers.


If Fort Worthians and Texans and Americans were to stop purchasing things made by those other cities, states, and nations, it would harm us and it would harm them.
The only groups to profit from the shutdown would be the government enforcers and guards at the arbitrary borders of our cages.  (And, of course, the businesses that would then have a monopoly in the goods and services that were prohibited from crossing our city, state, or national borders.)


If other countries ever stop swapping their stuff for our stuff, they're in a world of hurt.  Imagine what it does to a retailer to lose 20% of its customers.  The retailer has to lay off employees. 

Does anyone believe that any of the oil producing nations of the world can now afford to withhold oil from the United States?  They are all addicted to foreign dollars. 

They have to sell the stuff to somebody.  They can no more stop selling oil to us than Target, Wal-Mart, and Kroger can arbitrarily stop selling groceries to people whose names begin with a vowel.  It would kill them. 

I repeat....We aren't addicted to foreign oil.  The oil producing nations are addicted to foreign dollars.  Think of it that way for fifteen minutes, and you'll start laughing the next time a politician tries to play the race card (or the geography card). 

The Dilbert cartoon came from here.  The videos came from YouTube.  The source of the gasoline that got me to Starbucks this morning doesn't really matter. 

From Henry Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson", on the economic benefits of government spending

From Henry Hazlitt's classic "Economics In One Lesson", Chapter 4:

There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending. Everywhere government spending is presented as a panacea for all our economic ills. Is private industry partially stagnant? We can fix it all by government spending. Is there unemployment? That is obviously due to "insufficient private purchasing power." The remedy is just as obvious. All that is necessary is for the government to spend enough to make up the "deficiency."

....Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing.

They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves." We shall return to such extraordinary doctrines at a later point. Here I am afraid that we shall have to be dogmatic, and point out that such pleasant dreams in the past have always been shattered by national insolvency or a runaway inflation. Here we shall have to say simply that all government expenditures must eventually he paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that to put off the evil day merely increases the problem, and that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation.

A certain amount of public spending is necessary to perform essential government functions. A certain amount of public works-of streets and roads and bridges and tunnels, of armories and navy yards, of buildings to house legislatures, police and fire departments-is necessary to supply essential public services. With such public works, necessary for their own sake, and defended on that ground alone, I am not here concerned. I am here concerned with public works considered as a means of "providing employment" or of adding wealth to the community that it would not otherwise have had.

A bridge is built, If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary than the things for which the tax payers would have spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them, there can be no objection. But a bridge built primarily "to provide employment" is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. "Projects" have to he invented. Instead of thinking only where bridges must be built, the government spenders begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built. Can they think of plausible reasons why an additional bridge should connect Easton and Weston? It soon becomes absolutely essential. Those who doubt the necessity are dismissed as obstructionists and reactionaries.

Two arguments are put forward for the bridge, one of which is mainly heard before it is built, the other of which is mainly heard after it has been completed. The first argument is that it will provide employment. It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year. The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence.

This is what is immediately seen. But if we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridge workers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.

Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $1,000,000 taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, radio technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

But then we come to the second argument. The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. It has come into being through the magic of government spending. Where would it have been if the obstructionists and the reactionaries had had their way? There would have been no bridge. The country would have been just that much poorer.

Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and radios, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the unsold and ungrown foodstuffs. To see these uncreated things requires a kind of imagination that not many people have. We can think of these non-existent objects once, perhaps, hut we cannot keep them before our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day. What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.

We must apply the same reasoning, once more, to get projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Here, because of sheer size, the danger of optical illusion greater than ever. Here is a mighty dam, a of steel and concrete, "greater than anything capital could have built," the fetish of photographers, heaven of socialists, the most often used miracles of public construction, ownership Here are mighty generators and power ho whole region lifted to a higher economic level, attracting factories and industries that could not otherwise have existed. And it is all presented, in the panegyrics of its partisans, as a net economic gain without offsets.

We need not go here into the merits of the TVA or public projects like it. But this time we need a special effort of the imagination, which few people seem able to make, to look at the debit side of the ledger. If taxes are taken from people and corporations, and spent in one particular section of the country, why should it cause surprise, why should it be regarded as a miracle, if that section becomes comparatively richer? Other sections of the country, we should remember, are then comparatively poorer. The thing so great that "private capital could not have built it" has in fact been built by private capital -the capital that was expropriated in taxes (or, if the money was borrowed, that eventually must be expropriated in taxes). Again we must make an effort of the imagination to see the private power plants, the private homes, the typewriters and radios that were never allowed to come into existence because of the money that was taken from people all over the country to build the photogenic Norris Dam.

I have deliberately chosen the most favorable examples of public spending schemes-that is, those that are most frequently and fervently urged by the government spenders and most highly regarded by the public. I have not spoken of the hundreds of boondoggling projects that are invariably embarked upon the moment the main object is to "give jobs" and "to put people to work."

For then the usefulness of the project itself, as we have seen, inevitably becomes a subordinate consideration. Moreover, the more wasteful the work, the more costly in manpower, the better it becomes for the purpose of providing more employment.

Under such circumstances it is highly improbable that the projects thought up by the bureaucrats will provide the same net addition to wealth and welfare, per dollar expended, as would have been provided by the taxpayers themselves, if they had been individually permitted to buy or have made what they themselves wanted, instead of being forced to surrender part of their earnings to the state.

The pics for this post came from here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.