Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

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> [What if] the baker is wealthy and losing $250 will not affect his spending habits (over at least the course of decades)[?]

> The thing is, spending $250 today creates more work than spending $250 next year

In each of these cases, you're myopically focusing on consumption, while ignoring production. Over any period of time, society has a given productive capacity. Using up that capacity in an avoidable fashion necessarily detracts from the ability to apply that capacity to other problems. For example, if no one broke their windows, some of the glaziers may well go out of business, and engage in other, more socially beneficial (given the circumstances) courses of work, thus decreasing prices & increasing abundance in that area.

Even if the alternative is for money to be saved, rather than spent, then the problem is only changed to one of delayed consumption. And in the mean time of the delay, the baker is, by not using up productive capacity, reducing prices and increasing the availability of goods for others. The broken window is a net loss, just as Hazlitt describes.

God, you're right.

I went into writing that post fully intending to make the point that "producing work" for e.g. the glazier is only useful AT ALL if the glazier isn't already working as much as he wants; moreover, even in such a special circumstance, obviously no additional wealth is created by the window breaking and the glazier getting paid to fix it. But in the special circumstance of the glazier working less than he wants before he gets the job and then getting paid to do the job by a rich guy, something good still happens -- wealth is distributed to the glazier via a mechanism that is voluntary for all parties involved. This is vital. Even in the best of cases, "creating work" through the destruction and replacement of wealth amounts to charity and nothing more. But "forced charity" of this sort can be very good for an economy on the whole in certain circumstances. Like in a depression.

Anyway, I must've been really out of it; I usually don't get wrapped up in the details of making a point to such an extent that I forget the point that I'm trying to make. My entire post was pretty stupid, except for the part where I said that this book is blinded by its own biases (which I stand by). Sorry about that.

PS: I'm still not in a great state of mind (I'm exhausted but experiencing mild insomnia), so I make no guarantees about the quality of the post, either.

> For example, if no one broke their windows, some of the glaziers may well go out of business, and engage in other, more socially beneficial (given the circumstances) courses of work

Or they could go out of business and engage in less socially beneficial courses of work, like highway robbery. It is always possible to think up a pathological scenario where breaking the window helps/hurts the economy. I think the original framing of the analogy is the most general, but it usually helps to consider the actual case at hand without resorting to analogies at all.

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