printYou won’t hear Shepard Smith of Fox News suggest that, in order to create jobs in their own communities, people should set fire to their homes, and so help spur economic activity among local builders, landscapers, plumbers, and electricians.
But there the anchor was today, in Studio B, touting the economic benefits that would accrue from natural destruction.
The scale of Sandy the Storm guaranteed that it was a matter of time before John Maynard Keynes’ central stupidity would surface in the media. The stupidity Mr. Smith was giving voice to today is that out of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction will come jobs to revive the stricken region.
Residence along the battered eastern seaboard should hang tough, said Shep. Federal aid was on the way. Think about all the jobs that will be created in rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy.
As this thinking goes, war too is good for the economy, even though war always destroys individually owned real assets and capital.
The same goes for a storm such as Sandy.
For every dollar the government will spend, a dollar will be siphoned from you and me.
Like any committed statist, Shep sees big government—huge public works—and big deficits (especially during depressions), not as a bane but as a blessing, to be embraced as the key to economic boom.
In the short term, destruction will benefit some at the expense of others. The government will confiscate private property in the form of taxes (or steal wealth by stealth through its inflationary monetary policy) so as to create Shep’s imagined industries. These jobs will by short lived and unsustainable. For every government job generated, a real job will be lost in the private economy.