Utter Economic Nonsense

(A note from one of my friends on Hillary's latest shaky liberal think)

Good to see that Wellesley education didn't go to waste....

James Pethokoukis from U.S. News & World Report sends a long a link to this post on his blog, revealing a rather unbelievable and economically trite comment from Senator Hillary Clinton:

"This issue of energy and global warming has the promise of creating millions of new jobs in America. It can be a win-win, if we do it right."—Sen. Hillary Clinton, at last night's Democratic debate in South Carolina

And with that, Clinton seemingly stumbled into the classic economic trap known as the Broken Window Fallacy. As described by the French economist Fredric Bastiat, the fallacy imagines some punk kid chucking a rock through a store window. A bad thing, right? Yet a contrarian onlooker offers that the troublemaker may have actually helped the economy because now the storeowner will have to hire a glazier, who will make money replacing the window. Then the glazier will use that money to buy bread from a baker, who then might buy shoes from a cobbler. And the "multiplier effect" goes on and on, creating a more prosperous economy.

But Bastiat points out that such reasoning ignores the hidden costs to the shopkeeper, who was forced to spend money on windows instead of something else that may have had higher value to him or society, like a new suit or investing in a start-up tech firm.

Quite right. It is not productive for society to go about fixing broken windows all day. Just as it isn't exactly productive for our society to spend all its time fighting a global warming problem we a) don't even know exists and b) don't even know if we can stop anyway.

Besides, what Hillary is undoubtedly talking about is a massive anti-global warming bureaucracy that will employ people through the government. Meaning that not only would those employed produce nothing of worth for the nation's economy, their salaries and benefits (not to mention the funding for their agencies) would be a huge burden on taxpayers.

Hillary is, essentially, talking about helping the economy by expanding government. Which is the sort of utter economic nonsense only a child, or a liberal I guess, would subscribe to.