Florida or Ohio Redux

Oh man. These are definitely the two greatest states in the Union. Here's the headline (click through to the story only AFTER you guess its location):

MOTHER, SON ARRESTED IN $100,000 TOOTHBRUSH THEFT RING

Now you put your thinking caps on and tell me where this went down.

Broken Window

On Monday I taught this in my "Econ for Non-Majors" class (syllabus here, if you are interested...)

And used this very fine video, from the Dub-MOE.

A student noticed this, as he was walking out.  It was parked just outside the classroom.  Click for an even more deadweight loss image...

Apparently Krugman and his boys are trying to go around creating prosperity again....  After all, he proposed this.

Broken Windows and Giving Away Money

Grand Game!

Apparently, it doesn't matter how much we tax, as long as give the money away.  Because the people who receive the money will be made better off.

You can read it yourself!

A nod to EM

P-Kroog's new prescription for growth: Whimsy-Cal!

Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs. But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges? John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious 'preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.' Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, 'Solyndra! Waste!' Spend money on a weapons system we don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition. To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again. NYTimes

So, all you lefty bedwetters who wanted to defend Krugman as being "not serious" about the alien invasion thing...what now? I guess you have a new answer: Krugman was NOT serious, but he had overdosed on that new Keynesian diet supplement: "Whimsy-Cal!"

The alternative is that we need GW Bush back in office. Right? Elective wars are good for the U.S. and good for the digestive system. Or was that madcap P-Kroog just being "Whimsy-Cal" again?

UPDATE: Some pretty good reasons why this "Whimsy-Cal" thing is pretty dangerous.

It's Different if SPACE ALIENS Break the Window

The broken window fallacy is pernicious. John Stossel explains, for those of you who have lived under a rock, or studied economics at Harvard, MIT, or Princeton.

(heh; heh heh; heh: he said, "Fallacious")

Most recently, of course, it was KPC's favorite deep space Keynesian, P-Kroog.

Mary Theroux has some thoughts.


...

The Broken Window Fallacy

The Whitest Man on Earth talks about the Broken Window Fallacy.


The Bastiat text being referred to is here....