In a comment on James’ post below, I mentioned Frédéric Bastiat (pronounced bast-ya) and his essay, That Which is Seen and Unseen. Bastiat is the the source of the broken window fallacy we have talked about here several times. It is instructional that Bastiat wrote his essay in the middle of the nineteenth century, there is nothing new about the scams being used by government today.

Have a quick read of the start of Bastiat’s essay to get a feel for what is seen and unseen by a blissfully ignorant American electorate.

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

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.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

The same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others. Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight.

There is nothing new under the sun. What Bastiat describes is the current congressional health care reform scam. That which is unseen will absolutely overwhelm that which is seen. The congressional solution to that problem is to totally ignore what is unseen. That makes Americans happy too. Thus, Americans are allowing themselves to be deceived in exactly the same manner as people have for centuries.

You are read the rest of Bastiat’s essay here.