Let me just quote Steve Horwitz’s latest Facebook update:

“It’s a good thing I shaved my head this morning or else I’d be tearing out my peach fuzz with my fingernails thanks to the plethora of broken windows fallacies being bandied about in the media today. If you think Sandy is “good for the economy,” you are hereby remanded to my Econ 100 class (and ordered to read endless Bastiat) and I expect to see you cheering the next disaster that kills people because it boosts the demand for funeral homes and cemeteries.

Disasters, whether natural or social, DESTROY WEALTH AND MAKE US WORSE OFF. Period. End of sentence. There is NO “silver lining.” The economy would be BETTER OFF HAD SANDY NEVER HAPPENED. Got it?”

I got more hair than Steve, but he is spot on. It is unbearable to hear the stories about Sandy being good news for the US economy. Sandy is horrible news – for the the victims and for the US economy. Any other view is bordering idiotic.

Here is the two graph version of Sandy. Sandy is a negative supply shock and not a positive demand shock (that is what the journalists – and some keynesians – apparently fail to understand…). Sandy destroys production resources and disrupts production. That shifts the AS curve to the left (from AS to AS’) and reduces productions (from Y to Y’) and increases prices (from P to P’). That’s not good news. That is BAD NEWS.

But it could be worse! Imagine you have a inflation/price level targeting central bank that targets prices at P. Then it would tighten monetary policy and shift the AD curve to the left (to AD”) – maintaining prices at P and reducing production to Y”. This is what would have happened if Sandy had hit Europe. Yes, the ECB would have tightened monetary policy in reaction to Sandy – just remember what the ECB did in 2011 after the Japanese tsunami.

Update: I decided to add a picture to this post – this guy knew about the “Sandy fallacy”.