One local television station used to have a ridiculous format for its news intro that went something like this: Nuclear war breaks out, Johnstown decimated by fire, but the big news tonight is the annual Centre County Grange Fair opens tomorrow.
It was a quintessential example of pushing narrative and misplacing emphasis.
Along that line, as I write this, there are Queers for Palestine signs showing up at pro-Hamas protests even though Hamas would kill all queers, Kamala Harris has a stepdaughter who has helped raise $8 million for Hamas, police have debunked a claim that a person draped in an Israeli flag attacked a Muslim student of the University of North Carolina, and Secretary of State Antony Blinked reportedly is urging Israel to use “smaller bombs.”
But the big news is Clueless Joe Biden is pitching war in Ukraine and the Middle East as good for the U.S. economy because we make so many of the weapons being expended there. He specifically cited Pennsylvania for making artillery shells.
I hold Biden blameless for this latest shilling. It’s become clear, as he inadvertently reads out loud instructions to him on his teleprompter, or needs to refer to cheat sheets to identify friendly media members to call upon for questions, that Biden is a hollow shell.
But this pitching of war as economic development is a new low for his handlers.
Like most leftist proposals, it makes sense only if you don’t bother to think about it.
In their particular case, Biden’s ghost writers are invoking a falsehood familiar to anyone who has taken an Economics 101 course, that being the broken window fallacy.
The construct is attributed to a 19th century French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who created the story of a boy breaking a window of his father’s. In thinking that will ring true with typical leftists – the same people who believe borrowing trillions to waste on handouts is productive economics – gullible townspeople decide the kid was merely stimulating the economy by breaking the window.
They argue that a repair person would need to be paid to fix the window. Said person then would have more income to spend on other activities. And so on and so forth. The money would ripple through the local economy, with a multiplier effect. That’s how our local spinmeisters used to be able to gin up a $20 million estimate of the economic impact from Thunder in the Valley.
The fallacy of the breakage-for-economic-growth thinking, as pointed out by Bastiat, is that one also must consider other costs. The father would need to spend money on the window that he might have spent on other, more productive things. Also, the father incurred a time cost, needing to attend to the matter of arranging the window repair instead of working or being otherwise productive.
Further, replacing an existing window merely balanced out the value of the building and the town’s true value. It was a maintenance cost, which should be considered as such, not economic growth.
Biden’s puppeteers are not the first to invoke this broken window fallacy to justify armed conflict, nor will they be the last.
But it does smack of desperation, on par with the plaintive pleas from Zelenskyy not to forget Ukraine in this fresh emphasis on Israel.
As long as the U.S. is borrowing money at a ridiculous rate, Zelenskyy figures he, too, should be getting a huge slice of the handouts, until the money spigot is closed. You want broken windows? He will break millions of them.
Here’s a simple question for all these people pushing broken windows/or wars, as beneficial economically. If breaking one window, or supplying munitions for one war, is good, does it not follow that breaking all windows and having the world devolve into World War III would be even better?
That’s one question I’d love to hear answered.
Sam Ross Jr's site 