Visible Projects, Hidden Destruction - Ralph Reiland - Mises Daily

Visible Projects, Hidden Destruction - Ralph Reiland - Mises Daily: 'In fact, once creating jobs is viewed as the chief purpose of government spending, said Hazlitt, a project with more waste and more inefficiency in its implementation, and less labor productivity, will be viewed as superior to a less wasteful project. The "more wasteful the work, the more costly in manpower," he explained, "the better it becomes for the purpose of providing more employment."

A key fallacy in this thinking, Hazlitt explained, is that it ignores the incomes, the wealth, and the jobs that are "destroyed by the taxes imposed to pay for that spending." What's visible is the new school or new road, but what is unseen are those things that were lost through higher taxation, the unbuilt homes and unbuilt cars that don't exist because of the money that was redistributed away from those who earned it in order to pay for inefficient make-work projects. What is unseen are the unbuilt stores and unbuilt factories, the uninvested funds and the new enterprises that would have been created.'

'Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), for instance, likes the idea of the rest of us paying $315 million to build a useless and costly bridge in rural Alaska to an island with only 50 residents, an island that's already sufficiently accessible via a seven-minute ferry ride.

Giving a free $2 million yacht to every man, woman, and child on the island would have been $215 million cheaper than the bridge, but Rep. Young was chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, not the owner of a yacht company.'