If the problem is a rich guy is sitting on all the money and there's not enough cash moving around for the economy to function, then obviously you'd be better off just taking his money and giving it to people directly
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Tricking him into letting go of money by breaking his windows wastes most of the money you're taking from him (If you look past the abstraction of money, it wastes the time and effort of the people you're trying to help, making them spend all day fixing a window)
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The most common real life invocation of the broken window fallacy nowadays is people saying "WWII got us out of the Depression" and then using this to argue that war is a *good thing*, which is monstrous Keynes himself bitterly opposed "Military Keynesianism"
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WWII got us out of the Depression in the sense that the Axis threat gave FDR the power to directly force factories to hire people and step up production, to get people into the workforce and trained for trades via the military, to run big government deficits to raise cash, etc
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But it's a massive failure of our politics that we can only do that kind of thing when we're frightened for our lives Big picture, all of that economic power used to blow shit up and burn down buildings was wasted Every person killed was an economic loss
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If you look at WWII through a global lens it was a massive loss of wealth for the world It's just that it also *moved* wealth from the homeowner whose window was broken (the charnel houses of Europe) to the glazier paid to fix it (the US) so we perceived it as positive
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Eisenhower was acutely aware of this, and as our postwar president gave his famous speech about how the "military-industrial complex" robs the rest of the world Small picture, yes, defense moves government spending and creates jobs, but big picture that money is all wasted
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We could be doing literally anything else with the money that went into those jobs to actually make people's lives better overall, we could be using those people's time and talent and labor to build things that feed people or clothe them or house them or entertain them
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The idea that the only way the government can "create jobs" is the war machine is messed up and will constantly ratchet us closer to our own destruction
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Anyway from the econ side of it this is why the ideal form of "stimulus" is just giving money to poor people who will buy things they need with it If that's politically unviable and you must give them jobs, the jobs should be stuff they either want to do or obviously needs doing
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The more bullshit the "bullshit job" is that you create solely for stimulus the more of your stimulus is waste And this is an issue where the Protestant work ethic becomes the enemy of humane and rational policy
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Like if you think it's a waste for me to give money to someone for nothing, giving it to him in return for him doing a job he doesn't want to do and no one else wants him to do (digging and filling holes) *increases* the waste, it means *nobody* is happy
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