What's seen and unseemly
Bryan Caplan wrote a couple of interesting posts recently on Bastiat (1, 2). The first points out that modern liberals tend to not like him while conservatives and libertarians love him. The second is a weaker attempt at explaining the discrepancy. Matt Yglesias responds, awfully, pointing out that the broken windows fallacy doesn't address the efficacy of Keynesian-style stimulus or monetarist monetary policy. I'm still scratching my head on this; it's kind of like saying you're not a big fan of home runs, because they don't help you win football games. Bastiat may have had something to say about stimulus, I don't remember, but I seriously doubt anyone (or at least anyone half-intelligent) loves Bastiat because the BWF rebuts stimulus generally. They probably (correctly) would use it to oppose stimulus of the pay-people-to-destroy-their-crops-variety, but that's a different thing.
