Seen and unseen

This is very interesting, analogous to the "broken windows" problem in economics. Which means a socialist won't be able to understand this, either:

A counter-terrorism bleg


My own favorite economics example of this sort is a story about Henry Ford, whose goal was to produce affordable automobiles. So, when he traveled around, he'd make sure to visit local auto junkyards, where he'd examine junked Fords to see what parts had failed. The one part he noticed that never failed was the flywheel, even on cars with extremely high mileage. Ford's response was the only one that made sense to him: He ordered the factory the cheapen the flywheels. A million-mile flywheel in a 100,000-mile car is just a waste of the customer's money.

A socialist planner would probably issue directives to bring the whole car up to the standard of the flywheel, which would price the car out of reach of all but the wealthy, but that would be unfair. That problem would be solved by government subsidies and rebates collected from other people's taxes. What's unseen in that case is the government distortion of consumer demand:  Some goods and services people would like to buy are not bought, because the money is being taken by the government and redistributed to subsidize someone else's car purchase. Or to subsidize a boondoggle $535,000,000 solar panel factory. But I digress.

Byron