This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. Let us press onward. There’s another 40 miles of bad road ahead.
In this installment, the prog responds to the broken window fallacy and the parable of the pool. The broken window fallacy was first explained by Bastiat. He said that while a broken window is beneficial for glass making and window repair, it is harmful to the owner of the window, because the owner could have spent that money on something more productive than repairing the window.
The best recent example of the broken window fallacy was the Cash for Clunkers program, which paid people to destroy perfectly good cars in order to stimulate demand for new ones. The main result of that program is that the price of a used car rose by about $900.
Once again, the broken window fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Another false comparison, unless of course you are speaking specifically of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, which netted BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars for defense contractors that were providing the weaponry to blow up schools and bridges, and the contractors to repair those roads and bridges, and the private security forces to protect them at 5 times the rate of the US Military. All of which, of course was completely orchestrated and designed by said corporations, that are foreign multi-nationals, that were mapping out plans for war from day one of the Bush presidency and arguably had a hand in allowing 9/11 to happen unobstructed. Cheney’s company alone has made 50 billion+ to date and he inevitably profited handsomely from it. That is where the broken window fallacy makes sense. When it comes to roads and bridges and crumbling infrastructure or the post office or other necessary and needed services the comparison doesn’t really apply, because those things actually have to be maintained and fixed. Not to say there isn’t a lot of superfluous and unnecessary spending going on in government, but about 90% of that is on non essential military spending. Keeping troops stationed in hundreds of bases around the world and spending billions on planes and weaponry that are never going to be used and we’re never needed in the first place as well as spending billions if not trillions rebuilding countries we destroyed in the first place unnecessarily is the TRUE broken window fallacy in US government.
So there you have it. According to him, 90% of unnecessary govt spending is for the military. Pay no attention to the fact that the military is about 20% of total US federal govt spending.
Some background on the parable of the pool: according to the parable, trying to enrich the poor by taxing the rich is like taking water out of the deep end of a pool and pouring it into the shallow end. Just as the depths do not change, so the relative wealth of the two groups will not change. Of course, some water gets spilled along the way. This represents the indirect cost of govt transfer programs.
On the pool analogy. Once again, a completely false and misleading comparison. Our economy is far from a pool that we are all in together. There are TRILLIONS taken out of our economy by the very wealthy and corporations every year and put in offshore investments and bank accounts. A true analogy would be that the people in the deep end are taking thousands of buckets of water a day and pouring them into a series of tanker trucks that drive away with it, whereas everyone else is slowly pouring thimbles full of water into the shallow end. Once again this “redistribution of wealth” conservatives are always screaming about isn’t about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, it’s about leveling the playing field that the rich constructed in their favor over the last 3 decades where all the wealth gets redistributed to THEM. This isn’t rocket science. 97% of all economic growth has gone to the top 1%, when the top half of the 99% are the ones putting in all the hard work and effort. If you can’t understand that taking more and more FROM the economy and giving less and less back to the economy causes and enormous rift, no amount of poorly constructed half baked videos are going to help you understand. Just like anything else that is alive and grows, if it is not managed properly, it dies. If you cut down all the trees in the forest, without planting new ones, guess what? The forest dies. If you keep extracting more from.the economy than you give back to it, guess what? It dies. The economy should be treated like a business of any kind, or a well.managed forest, you give back to it as you take from it to help it grow and thrive. Too many people at the top are treating it more like a strip mine, and we all know what that has done for West Virginia.
Well, he’s right about trillions being taken out of the economy- except it’s by the govt. Sort of. Still more zero-sum game economics.
How do you do this without brain damage?
Um…
“Another false comparison, unless of course you are speaking specifically of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, which netted BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars”
I’m often amused by the rejection of war spending on the part of the left. If government spending jump starts the economy, why does it matter where it’s spent?
Because we could be helicopter dropping that money on poor neighborhoods Bernanke-style, which would finally eliminate poverty. Or something.
Krugabe, with his pining for another world war as just the right tonic to snap us out of our economic doldrums, understands this.
+1 Fake Alien Invasion
Well, if we blew inside the beltway to smithereens….
I can see very few negatives to this proposal.
Interestingly, the research on multipliers shows the HIGHEST multiplier for government spending is for war spending.
Not necessarily defense spending.
That isn’t an argument in favor of war, just an argument about how stupid multiplier rationales for spending are.
GIGO.
Did he call the broken window fallacy a fallacy itself, without any irony? Or did I read that wrong?
Follow up, he used Iraq war to deflect away from any discussion of the fallacy.
How is it that he’s able to spend a whole paragraph on the Broken Window Fallacy without once a actually addressing what the Fallacy’s entire argument is? I’m trying to decide if he’s being deliberately evasive or is just that dumb, though I’m not ruling out c) all of the above.
Most likely c. You have to be pretty dumb to get that good at evading and sounding sincere.
I was wondering that myself.
He sounds exactly like someone I know.
Lots of blah, blah with kernels of truth and figures to make it look legitimate (97%!) but they never address anything specifically.
Man, that’s an ace retort. “Fallacy? Oh yeah? Well, YOUR argument is the fallacy!”
Yes leon, he called it a fallacy and then said it was accurate and applied in one narrow case…a case where he disagreed with policy.
I’m a little baffled as to why these self-proclaimed “anti-war” lefties trotted out in droves to vote for Hillary Clinton, a woman who has supported damn near every single war of her entire political career.
BOOOOOOOOOSH!
It’s interesting that he pulled a 90% statistic clean out of his ass for the first argument, since 90% of his entire argument was one giant strawman against the military industrial complex. Also really love the “It’s a lie unless it’s something I agree with and then it’s 100% true.”
It’s all made up numbers. It’s unsurprising that deficits don’t bother these people, since they have no real conception of how big a trillion is.
Of course, some water gets spilled along the way.
“Order now, and we’ll include a second jug of Authentic Rejuvenating Snake Oil, FREE! You pay only shipping and handling. Order now. Bureaucrats are standing by.”
Our economy is far from a pool that we are all in together. There are TRILLIONS taken out of our economy by the very wealthy and corporations every year and put in offshore investments and bank accounts.
Oh, for crying out loud.
“YUR EETIN ALL TEH PIEZ. I KAN HAZ PIEZ TOO!”
Apparently he is a xenophobe too. He doesn’t consider foreigners part of the pool.
I guess they get a separate but equal pool.
Does he seriously think that banks are full of Scrooge McDuckian money rooms? Does he know what an investment account is? Does he have to wear a pair of headphones 24/7 reminding him to breathe in and breathe out?
That’s like my prog friends who scream “they only have to answer to the shareholders!!!!”
Um, yeah, and it’s highly likely that you, Mr. or Ms. Progressive, are one of those shareholders. There are these things called 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, etc.
the few times i’ve tried explaining to progs that the largest “Shareholders” in America are public-employees pension-funds (eg. NEA/Teacher’s unions, state-local workers @ AFSCME, SEIU, etc)…. they squint at me like i’ve just told them that these aren’t the droids they’re looking for.
they rant and scream and moan about how banks are evil and profit is terrible, but then complain they can’t get a guaranteed, cheap fixed-rate loan.
complain they can’t get a guaranteed, cheap fixed-rate loan.
These are people who clearly didn’t have a mortgage in the 90s. Or the 70s.
The rates for deadbeats who can barely qualify for a loan is still lower than what I thought was a low rate on my first mortgage.
My brother bought in at around 3.25% a couple years ago. He was living on workman’s comp at the time while his knee healed, hadn’t shown terrific income even before he injured himself, and put down five grand which he’d borrowed from family.
That’s not to make him out as some sort of deadbeat, he’s a good guy who’s back on his feet and never missed a payment, but good god are lending reqs broken.
Just closed on my new house and I was complaining that rates were UP to 4.25%.
I thought 8.25% was insanely good in 1998.
We got ours for 3.25% 5 years ago. Might be the only time in my life I’ve ever “timed” the market perfectly. Complete luck, of course.
They rail against their own interests!
A “progressive” I know was complaining about how Brexit allegedly fucked up his stock portfolio.
Just like anything else that is alive and grows, if it is not managed properly, it dies.
“Now, where’s my axe? I’ve got me a goose to kill.”
I want to cut military spending as much as the next guy (actually, more than the next guy), but we’re not going to balance the budget just through cutting defense.
It should all be cut, but the spending on things that the federal government is not actually empowered to do under the Constitution (read: not military spending) needs to go first.
Are the CIA/NSA/FBI budgets included in defense spending?
Not the FBI
And the CIA is funded directly by the Federal Reserve, is it not?
According to the graphic, and my recollection, it’s DoD. I suspect that’s not including black funding, however.
That’s so racist.
That’s a good question, and one to which I don’t know the answer.
Hmm – this reminds me of the time I put a Heinlein quote on my FB page.
And the response I got my friend was similar: argue around the point while
The Quote‘
…argue around the point while never addressing it.
Yep. I’ve posted a Bastiat quote (Socialist think we are against education because we…) and the responses were all variations of “I don’t like that because it makes me feel bad”.
You should reply, “Maybe it makes you feel bad because you realize you are wrong.”
When I last posted that quote, I got lectured on how public schools need to have a mandatory course on political systems so that people like me would know the difference between Bernie Sanders’ Democractic Socialism and the other kinds of failed experiments.
After I started forcing them to confront the fact that what they called Democratic Socialism was Chavez’ Bolivaran Socialism, they unfriended me and blocked me.
It was not an improvement on other times. Usually they just get unfriend me right away and we waste less of each other’s time. 😉
I’ve always found it ironic that it was a mandatory American Government course that pushed me into libertarianism. Then again, it sounds like most American Government courses in public schools exist simply to teach kids about partisanship.
Being a Brit couldn’t comment, but I can only say that “Gov/Pol” was certainly what launched “Teenage Libertarian Student Daughter” into political engagement.
She was fortunate that it turned out that her teacher turned out to be a Classical Liberal.
Noice. Teachers can make a big difference if they aren’t morons.
Yeah – we had exactly one social science teacher at my high school (late 80s) who wasn’t an ex-SDS working on creating the next generation of activists. I took many classes with him, and wound up as an aid by senior year.
My favorite line from him as some of the other teachers’ disciples were talking up the Communist Manifesto was something to the effect of ‘We won’t ever have a Communist revolution in this country because people don’t want to have a revolution so they can stand in lines for toilet paper. It’s as simple as that.”
After a few weeks, all the kids in the class wanted to know his views. He was assiduously neutral, but promised he’s spend 10 minutes right after exams if they wanted to hang around.
One of the kids printed up a blank Nolan Chart and they all placed bets on where he plotted on the chart. They were all wusses and set the stake at $1. I think the other libertarian-ish kid in the class won the pot. All the other kids were all over the place.
My daughter guessed pretty close, after she was the only one prepared to take the pro- side on the “Decriminalize Prostitution Yesterday” debate,
… and he had to defend her a bit from the outrage of the rest of the class.
I got somewhat lucky in that regard. Most of the teachers I had in high school that taught such subjects were traditionalists that were on the verge of retirement. They actually insisted that there were multiple sides to the same issue. Imagine that. Of course these were Honor/AP courses that nobody really took.
In contrast, in a similar course in college the professor made a moral statement over the 2nd amendment and then declared that we will not be discussing it further. I guess years of discussing 2A with people from Arizona taught him to avoid the subject. Did I mention I thought he was a pussy?
My Govt course was also an AP course, and I think that’s why I got a fairly unbiased view. (At least, my teacher stayed neutral.) It was basically a look at what the role of each branch was, and how the power dynamics had changed, etc. Didn’t really get bogged down in the issues, which is a good way of teaching government I think.
Bernie Sanders’ socialism was regular socialism, hence Sanders’ remark about bread lines were proof of a successfully managed economy.
I want to cut military spending as much as the next guy (actually, more than the next guy), but we’re not going to balance the budget just through cutting defense.
You cannot cut military spending! You cannot cut any government spending. That number is part of GDP, and if you change the number, you have destroyed the economy! Don’t you Political SCIENCE, dude?
Is this guy operating under the stratagem of, “The Best Offense is a Good Defense”? I mean, he must be attempting to defy parody by out-parodying the parody, right?
Right?
Is nobody going to discuss the 9/11 trutherism that was casually thrown into the prog’s first quote?
please don’t
Inside my head right now.
I am a little bit curious as to his opinions on Russian hacking.
It was oddly fitting.
To be a full-on truther, don’t you have to believe the attack was a false flag, not just the act of foreign terrorists which Bush just let happen?
When your team is just as for the War on Terror as the other one, some allowances have to be made.
I don’t know. if someone were to tell me that the FBI or CIA were the masterminds of 9-11 I wouldn’t automatically dismiss them as crazy, how many other “terror” attacks have they helped wannabe Jihadis plan?
It’s when you start coming up with insane theories about how the planes couldn’t take down the towers you go off the deep end in my mind
“For the first time in history, fire melted steel”
-Rosie O’Donnell
Holy shit, she actually said that…
Part of me thinks that I miss things like this because I don’t really watch the news that much, and part of me says that it’s because the media treats stupid soundbites from right-wingers as proof that they’re all blathering morons while quietly burying similarly stupid things spoken by left-wingers.
Well then, the only feasible solution to make sure all this is necessary is to have the military bomb our roads and bridges so we can pay to fix and maintain them.
you have just created the ultimate Keynesian perpetual-motion-machine
It’s why Somalia is such paradise today?
Also, the “treating the economy like a business” comment made me chuckle. I thought business was all evil and wanted to destroy the working man.
If only embezzling was illegal in this context.
Not a “business” business. The kind of business where they are not evil and don’t try to make a profit.
I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a Krugabe-fellator who managed to combine “broken window fallacy”, “societies function better on a war footing”, “multiplier effect” and “what we need is a strong leader” in about 2 minutes of interaction. I asked him how he felt about all the people that are killed and impoverished by war and I got a load of handwaving about how an improving economy would eventually benefit them – a weird kind of “trickle down economics” which enriches survivors, but still leaves them subservient to The Man.
“Dude, how about this. Japan and America have two of the greatest technological cultures on Earth. If what you are saying is true, then Trump should be on the phone doing a deal with the Japanese Diet. We can both build the most awesome mecha-navies imaginable, costing trillions of dollars, then declare war over the ownership of Guam, and then have a totally robotic naval battle (broadcast rights available) and ideally, they’re so closely matched that after everything is sunk, we have to do it all over again, effectively bombing each other to prosperity. The side effects will be unified nations, all pulling together to defeat an enemy, government stimulus, technological innovation, and a return of heavy industry to the US. Is that something you could and would support?”
The answer I got was that all the prosperity created would be “stolen” by the industrialists.
So he was a pro-war anti-business type? Don’t see too many of those around. The logic knots you have to jump through to get there are pretty extreme even for your typical statist.
I think if the US nationalized all industry first, he would have been happier. This guy is one of those “FDR was a super genius” types.
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think many people would phrase it exactly that way, but consider The Hobbit, for example, and the way it portrays the Lord of Laketown as a man who is ignobly concerned with profit and neglects the nobility of ‘worthwhile’ (i.e. military) struggles.
Most people think of themselves as ‘non-militaristic,’ but when confronted with a choice between eliminating conflict through trade and eliminating it through obliterating your enemies (or, as we prefer to call them, ‘evil people’), most people see the former as reprehensible and the latter as truly noble.
Yeah, good point. Most people I know would see military interventionism as a good thing (though they would say it’s a necessary evil,) but when I talk about repealing sanctions, they look at me like I’m Stalin incarnate.
Well, war is hell, but at least it’s not commerce (ick!).
Was this fellow’s spiel in response to C4C, or just about the broken windows fallacy? Because if the former, holy hells talk about losing the thread. If the latter, well, talk about missing the forest for the trees. He does not seem like an honest broker of ideas.
This right here is fundamental to Progressive misunderstandings of economics.
They don’t see ‘The Economy’ as an abstraction describing the sum total of voluntary individual exchanges in which each individual walked away with something more valuable than what they gave up. They see it as some great pile of stuff somewhere that people take things from. The more I take, the less you get.
Impossible. I was told that the economy was a living breathing thing, and that it gets angry if you spend too much.
Which, to be fair, is true in the context of the government. Since there is no value generally created by government activities.
And this is probably the center of it, really – i.e. that when a Progressive speaks of ‘the economy’ what they really are holding in mind is ‘government,’ or maybe on an even more primitive level, the concept of the king’s gold-hoard which he distributes to his loyal followers.
That really is zero-sum, and Progressives seem to have a hard time imagining an economy that functions independently of the king’s gold-hoard.
Your putting it that way just made me have an epiphany.
Well then, the only feasible solution to make sure all this is necessary is to have the military bomb our roads and bridges so we can pay to fix and maintain them.
Milo Minderbinder is the man to see about that.
I have a share of the syndicate, so it’s okay.
“97% of all economic growth”
The left sure are fond of using this 97% thing, aren’t they?
Something about “confidence levels”, I guess.
I was going to mention that.
It reminds me of Cosmopolitan numerology. Its about the allure of specificity. “182” is more convincing than “200”. It suggests a high level of sub-detail was involved to produce that aggregate number. Never mind the triviality of the things being ‘counted’.
re: the global warming thing…. I’ve also never met anyone who cited that who recognized the name “Oreskes” or actually knew what the 97% referred to. the best you can get is “Scientists!”
OK, so that idea I had about launching a band named “Wink-200” ain’t gonna fly?
Meh.
Corneal Reflex-821 might work.
Your link just took me to images of cosmopolitan magazine covers. Was that the goal?
yes
“Five ways to satisfy your guy’s math kink.”
My reference was to the numbers which Cosmo has put on its covers since the ~1970s.
they are famous for using absurdly-specific numbers.
i talked to an editor there about it once and she explained background-research into how women fetishize odd-numbers and certain combinations of odd/even. they’re real big on 3 and 8. Maybe its the shape.
The six things every cheater does
1. Cheats
2-6. …
2. Has sex with other people
3. Lies about having sex with other people
4. Looks for people to have sex with that are not you
5. Talks to people about sex, and then has sex with them
6. Dodges commitment
1. Be a man.
2. Cheat.
3-6…
Oh, and LOLworthy – there’s a strong possibility I was a TA in some of Oreskes’ undergrad classes.
I can’t say I remember the name or the face. I remember a few of the students – usually on the basis of them being nice to be around and talented, so I guess Naomi failed on one of those two criteria.
Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” is to the Global Warming Cult what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was to the anti-semites of the early 20th century; a libel manufactured out of whole cloth that served as proof of the evilness of their intended victims that justified any sort of legal sanction and physical violence.
The fact that Harvard fetes her as one of their stars rather than firing her in disgrace for her fraudulent scholarship is the main reasons that my children have been told in no uncertain terms that if they attend Harvard, they do it on their own dime, including coming up with the application fee from their own pockets.
We do this in construction pricing for public works all the time. Governing boards are always skeptical of round numbers, so even on a $100M project, we’ll calculate all the costs to the penny. They’re much less likely to doubt a number like $192,687.38.
You also want to avoid landing on 5 or 10s (to avoid the appearance of rounding), or repeating too many numbers (I.e. $603,335.15). This is why 97% is better than 95%.
Fake or real precision always wins the day, just as ‘Dr.’ wows credentialists. Accuracy comes in a (very distant) second until someone who understands the numbers gets involved.
“Tax Man” just came on my Pandora station.
“If 5% should seem too small, be grateful I don’t take it all”
Strangely fitting.
Something I just learned:
Ken Cuccinelli tried to make it the state song of Virginia.
George Harrison, greatest Beatle.
Me, I would go with most under-rated Beatle.
I’d definitely agree with that.
And my original statement, also.
I tend to waiver on such questions just because star-power can be so blinding, and the overly-worshipped tend to engender a “you’re not all that” counter-reaction.
I see Harrison-McCartney as sort of a Salieri-Mozart situation. Harrison was, in many ways, a better musician because he lacked McCartney’s raw talent. OTOH, McCartney’s raw talent led him to be glib about it, and he eventually just starting coasting in a way that never would have been acceptable to Harrison. Which one is ‘better?’ Probably an individual value judgment.
I also recently had a conversation around ‘which was the most avant-garde Beatle where I felt I had to be contrary and say Harrison, because while Lennon’s “Revolution 9” is pretty much a straight-up rip off of stuff Varese was doing 15 years before, Harrison was right on top of world music in its infancy.
Plus, Harrison’s lyrics tend to be better than Lennon’s or McCartney’s.
But if you remove the hyperbolic public worship of Lennon and McCartney, which no mortal could ever possibly deserve, I still maintain that they both outshine Harrison, if only a little bit, and maybe only because they were both more prolific and had wider ranges of capability.
My personal reason for thinking that is that I think Harrison’s music has stood up better. Lennon and McCartney’s Music Hall sing-alongs don’t do much for me.
As far as avant garde, they were leading from behind. Sgt. Peppers would have never been created without the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
A perfect example – if there’s anything that’s really breaking new ground on that album, it’s “Within You, Without You.” That’s the only song on that album I’m not permanently sick of, in fact.
But in fairness, even Lennon said they were over-rated as far as innovation. His line was that the Beatles were like the ornamental lady on the prow of a ship – it’s the first thing you see, but it’s really far from being what is propelling the ship forward.
Might be Ringo.
I don’t know – I think Ringo might be the most over-rated. It’s a tough call, and that’s the star-power thing (no pun intended). Is he talented enough to be as famous as he is? Holy shit, no. Is he as bad as he gets painted as by the “he’s not talented enough to be that famous” crowd? Not nearly.
Maybe both “most over-rated” and “most under-rated.”
True fact: my bassist uncle taught me how to play ‘Taxman’.
But he’s such a bassist!
By the way, Penguin- another excellent episode of “Secret Nazi President”.
Shouldn’t the Deep Staters and their cheerleaders be happy to discover he is a dupe and conspirator of the Commie Superpower?
P Brooks – thanks. Also, this.
I am by no means a Beatles historian. I kind of liked Ringo because he at least projected an aura of humanity, and seemed to have a sense of humor, unlike that sanctimonious douchebag Lennon, who seemed about as humorless as could be possible.
I don’t know anything about The Beatles other than the fact that I found most of their music to be bland and sometimes quite annoying…
But one thing I will boldly declare is that John Lennon was an asshole for singing “imagine no possessions” while amassing a net worth of several million.