Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy isn’t even an analogy when it comes to Obama

One can only stand back in awe.

President Obama said this at Home Depot today:

“The simple act of retro-fitting” — installing new windows, doors, cooling and heating equipment, etc. — “is one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest things we can do to put Americans back to work while saving money and reducing harmful emissions,” Obama continued. (11:19 a.m.)

He also said he thinks energy efficiency and retrofitting are “sexy,” according to Politico: “I know the idea may not be very glamorous, although I get pretty excited about it.”

But, one might ask, where does the money come from to do the sexy retrofit? Frederic Bastiat first described this broken window fallacy; here is Henry Hazlitt’s explanation of it from Economics in One Lesson. For some of us, a government that gets out of the way of free enterprise and true economic recovery is pretty sexy.