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IPFS News Link • Government

Bloomie's Broken Window Blooper

• Economic Policy Journal
 
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is closing in on a milestone: building or preserving 165,000 city-financed apartments and houses for low-, moderate- and middle-income families, the goal of a $7.5 billion housing plan he announced in 2002 and expanded in 2005.

It has already financed the creation or preservation of 94,000 units, including 72,000 for low-income households, city officials say.

But those efforts have been overwhelmed by a far larger number — the 200,000 apartments affordable to low-income renters that New York City has lost over all, because of market forces, during the mayor’s tenure.


Oh Bloomie! While you may be in charge of executing the law, and your police buddies are responsible for enforcing it, Bastiat wrote the book, literally. Bastiat's The Law, published 1850, decried the twin evils of "stupid greed" and "false philanthropy" and served as a follow-up to his earlier pamphlet That Which Is Seen And That Which Is Unseen, which first related his Parable of the Broken Window which made the simple observation of redistributive welfare economics-- it doesn't work. For every dollar spent by the government on a welfare project, corporate or individual, there is concurrently one less dollar available to be spent in the private sector. In The Law, Bastiat railed against the "protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits" of stupid greed and the "guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works" of false philanthropy.

Hey, Bloomie, which of these farcical fallacies have you pursued in your wanton violation of unrepealable (economic) Law?

When you read the sly propaganda of the NYT and learn that Bloomie has almost "built or preserved" 165,000 apartments and houses for "low-, moderate- and middle-income families" with his $7.5 billion program, you ought to make like Bastiat, the economic Lawficer, and ask yourself these questions:
 
--Whose money did Bloomie use to do this?

--How did he decide on the $7.5 billion figure (what calculation did he arrive at to conclude this was an optimal amount)?

--How many apartments and houses, for families and individuals of all economic strata, were NOT built because


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