The glazier cheers when your window breaks
Henry Hazlitt identified the single error lurking behind half of economic policy — and proved it with a broken pane of glass.
A shopkeeper's window is smashed. The glazier gets paid. The neighborhood looks on and someone murmurs that, well, at least it's good for the economy — put a craftsman to work, kept money moving.
Hazlitt, writing in 1946, saw something the bystanders missed. The shopkeeper had been planning to spend that money on a new pair of shoes. He doesn't anymore. The shoemaker never gets the order; no one thinks to mourn for the shoe that wasn't made.
Destruction shifts where money goes. It does not create more of it. The town ends with one repaired window where before it had one intact window plus a pair of shoes — it is unambiguously poorer.
Hazlitt traced this same error — the habit of counting only visible gains while ignoring invisible losses — through wartime spending, import tariffs, farm subsidies, and make-work programs. In every case, the visible beneficiary gets named; the invisible forgone opportunity never does.
The exercise is uncomfortable precisely because the invisible is real. Before any policy argument about who gains, the honest question is: what doesn't get built, hired, or bought because this spending exists?