The Vile, Pernicious Broken Window Fallacy

Kudos to Kevin Brancato at Truck and Barter for his terse explanation of the broken window fallacy. I remember after the Mississippi River flooding in 1993, Bruce Babbitt saying something like “well at least the silver lining is that the destruction will create lots of work.” I think I yelled loudly enough and long enough that my neighbors thought I had finally lost it. The broken window fallacy is a pernicious and illogical construct that needs to have the light of day shone on it so it goes scurrying back into the recesses of the brain like the conceptual cockroach it is.

UPDATE: By the way, terse is a compliment. Would ’twere that more people could communicate information effectively and tersely at the same time!