Bastiat Alert

That old seen and unseen fallacy never quite goes away, does it?

Here's the latest outbreak:

ALMOST 800 jobs were safeguarded or created in the final quarter of 2009 after Scottish Enterprise paid out more than £7 million in regional selective assistance (RSA).

But how many other jobs were lost as a result of the taxes extracted to pay for the jobs favoured by Scottish Enterprise (sic)?

As the great Bastiat put it:

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.