La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for August 12, 2009

Longtimecomicsfan: The Invisible Man fallacy does not need to take wealth creation into account because wealth creation is irrelevant to the principle.

“Invisible Man” is a specific application of the wider principle that any evaluation of an economic policy must look at both immediate and future results, direct and indirect consequences, the reality achieved vs. the potential lost. This all still applies regardless of whether wealth is being created, destroyed, or hoarded in the basement.

The best treatment I have seen of this idea is in the classic book “Economics in One Lesson”, written by Henry Hazlitt in the 1940’s but still in print. I think some of its examples are updated in the newest editions, but old or new, it is an eye-opening insight into how to think properly about economics.

Taking your reference to Economics 101 literally, if your textbook was like most, it was based on an anti-free-market assumption of government management of some or all of the economy. There are only a few textbooks that emphasize free market economics rather than the mixed economy, usually obscured by the terms macro- and micro-economics.

(When I was in college the biggest selling economics text was Paul Samuelson’s. It was a sign of the decline of our ecomony when Samuelson (Paul, not Robert) replaced Hazlitt as the economics columnist at Newsweek in the 1960s.)

It’s hard to know your economic views from what little you wrote, but the mere use of the words “wealth can be distributed” is not a good sign.