Investing

Cash for Clunkers: The Seen and Unseen

John Tamny of RealClearMarkets When asked who his favorite economist was, Ronald Reagan used to say Fredric Bastiat. Bastiat was a 19th-century economic philosopher from France, and while his numerous books are full of countless insights, he’s probably best known…

By Douglas A. McIntyre

Published August 17, 2009, 9:56am ET · 1 min read

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John Tamny of RealClearMarkets

When asked who his favorite economist was, Ronald Reagan used to say Fredric Bastiat. Bastiat was a 19th-century economic philosopher from France, and while his numerous books are full of countless insights, he’s probably best known for introducing the notion of the “seen and the unseen.”

To explain this in easy-to-understand terms, Bastiat referenced a broken window. In this case, the “seen” was a shopkeeper’s broken window that would create economic growth for the shopkeeper hiring a glazier to replace the window, with the glazier spending the money earned elsewhere. Break enough windows and suddenly a great deal of economic activity occurs.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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