The Broken Window Fallacy
link The Blast.
This link is great. An elegantly simple rebuttal to economic idiots who claim that destruction is actually stimulative to economies. Just goes to show that even Nobel prize winners are wrong, no matter how much notoriety they get.
Anyone who has been involved in running an enterprise, no matter how small, will understand the broken windows analogy as it applies to their operation. Excessive taxes, surcharges, levies, fees, permits and restrictions of all sorts thrust upon them by governments at all levels are broken windows that suck productivity from an enterprise. The next time a distinguished academic tries to foist an Utopian business model upon the public, someone should check their business background. Have they ever even run even a lemonade stand? Even if the business was a failure, that would be far more useful experience than sucking at the nipple of a government job, or horrors, a career academic.
Imagine if Sir Edmund Hilary decided to use the directions of Harvard cartographers instead of Tenzing Norgay, the experienced Sherpa guide, in his quest to scale Mt. Everest. He’d be famous today only to his family who’d remember him as crazy Uncle Edmund who tried to climb a mountain with a just a light jacket and some trail mix.
People who are pushing the redistributive agenda today are no different than a sherpa guide that counsels you to keep following the the trail down into the valley because eventually you will reach the summit. Maybe the best idea is to pay them only upon arrival.