The Broken Window Reader

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The Broken Window Reader

Mises Daily:Friday, November 02, 2012 by Daniel J. Sanchez

Another hurricane strikes, and, as always, it has been followed by another round of pundits proclaiming that it will boost the economy.

The broken-window fallacy lives on.

But with the lessons contained in the following resources, you can easily blow down the fundamentally flimsy arguments of the hurri-Keynesians.

This short film, created by intrepid Mises University students in 2010, is a splendid introduction to the broken-window fallacy:

The great Frédéric Bastiat was the first to tell the "Broken Window" story, pointing out the fundamental error involved in extolling destruction for the business it "creates." The story can be found in his classic essay, "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen," which is included in The Bastiat Collection.

Henry Hazlitt retold the broken-window story, and applied its lesson it to many modern economic issues in his powerful Economics In One Lesson. In the 1978 edition, he made an extremely important point that counters those who point to the "modernization" that follows a disaster, whether man-made or natural:

It is sometimes said that the