“Pure fallacy from beginning to end” at Catallaxy Files.
In this video, Milton Friedman deals with the left’s eternal favourite, the broken window fallacy. When I was a student politician, there was a Trot called Andy on the NUS executive. After every conference motion, he screwed up the papers and threw them on the ground exclaiming “more jobs!” His stupidity was rather funny then, but when it dominates economic thinking it’s less amusing.
Money is a token. It has no intrinsic value. It’s only useful as a means of exchanging goods and services. The measure of our wealth is the quantity of goods and services available to be exchanged and therefore our ability to produce them. Money should, if properly managed, track the value of that wealth, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing – as witness the fact that making more of it simply reduces its purchasing power.
Government jobs are overhead. Almost every business has to have some overhead, but business people understand that it must be kept to the necessary minimum. All libertarians ask is that voters understand that at a national level as well as they do in their everyday dealings.
h/t razor-sharp ozblog Catallaxy Files
The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
Leave a comment