print“The art of economics,” wrote Henry Hazlitt, “consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Hazlitt was encapsulating Bastiat’s What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen principle.
“Flanked by emergency medical personnel,” write the editors at the WSJ, “Mr. Obama made his usual threat of Armageddon if automatic spending cuts go forward on March 1. Americans can expect more such melodrama in the coming days, so as a public service we thought we’d break down the President’s three biggest political tricks.”
Members of the “oink sector” were front and center in Obama’s show. What you didn’t see were the many private-sector suckers who work to fund the wealth consuming sponger sector, members of which were on show. What you didn’t see were the unemployed in the private sector, who are displaced because of the growth of government.
Think zero-sum, or parasite vs. host. The first (the parasite) is sucking the lifeblood of the second (the host). The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.
UPDATED (2/22): “What a bunch of Keynesians,” writes the Fox News column “Power Play” about … the Republicans. Now that’s progress. (Fox News is usually a megaphone for the GOP.)
So here sit Republicans, teeth clenched, gripping their desks, waiting for the “devastating” cuts to explode the economy and just hoping that Obama will get some of the blame for having invented the thing. They are assuming that $85 billion less spent by the government will cause devastation in an economy of some $16 trillion.
The sequester, as everyone knows, “was …the brainchild of Team Obama.” It is nothing more than a “decrease in the increase in spending,” another good way to describe the “crippling reductions [Obama] says will result from the government spending only $15 billion more this year than last year.”