Have you ever gotten the feeling after spending a lot of money that you could have spent it better somewhere else? Or maybe you could have saved it and gotten something more expensive later?

I get that feeling every time I read about more spending by any government or government agency – local, state, or federal – that exceeds a few thousand dollars.

Any more spending than that and I start wondering if the methods employed by major corporations to evade taxes can be adopted by individuals. Nine times out of 10 I guarantee you that all taxes and tax exemptions are, like regulations, done at the behest of special interests.

For instance last week Gov. Deval Patrick introduced a bill into the House of Representatives seeking $500 million over 10 years for biotechnology subsidies.

According to a Masslive.com article, at the same time he announced $12 million for biotech grants immediately out of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. Now I heartily agree with Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America is business,” but quite frankly I don’t like it when my money (well, not my money because I’m from Vermont) that I worked hard for is taken – stolen – from me and given to some corporation (or anyone else, for that matter).

I don’t like it because I still adhere to the morality taught in preschool – stealing is bad, hurting other people is bad, etc. And it’s not only that so many supposedly upstanding people of the community have discarded these morals wholesale (i.e. politicians imposing taxes to fight wars) but also because it’s bad for the economy as a whole.

Sure jobs will be created for the people with university degrees and the trickle-down effect will take its course (whoever would have thought that a Democratic governor of Massachusetts would practice Reaganomics?), but government spending is bad for the economy for a different reason. French economist Frederic Bastiat first articulated this Broken Window Fallacy in the 19th century.

Imagine a shop window being broken. At first everyone is worried – is the shopkeeper all right, was anything stolen, will we have to go to a different shop while the window is being repaired, etc?

But as the window is repaired they come to the conclusion that the act of vandalism was, in fact, a good thing because the shopkeeper had to pay the glazier to repair the window and the glazier then spent money around town, buying whatever he needed.

Now the reason that this is called a fallacy is because no new wealth was created, wealth was actually destroyed. In Bastiet’s “That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen” he said, “Society loses the value of things uselessly destroyed.”

To understand this, imagine what the shopkeeper could have done if the window had not been broken. He could have spent the money to replace something no longer usable (like a worn pair of shoes) or bought something completely new.

Either way, value would be gained because something new would be produced instead of something senselessly destroyed rebuilt.

The reason I bring up the Broken Window Fallacy is because government spending has the same effect on the economy as a window-breaking vandal. Since we’re dealing with Massachusetts here, I’ll ignore Federal and local taxes.

Suppose you make the per capita personal income in Massachusetts, $42,102. With a flat income tax of 5.3 percent, that means that $2,231.41 is taken from you by the Commonwealth, in addition to 5 percent of whatever you might purchase excluding groceries, periodicals and clothing under $150.

Some may argue that taxes pay for some good things, but that ignores the power of the unrestricted free market to provide goods and services cheaply and efficiently. This is a power that is outside the scope of the present column. Those interested in pursuing such arguments I refer to www.mises.org and the Austrian Study Guide.

But I digress. Like the shopkeeper, if you did not have to fork over the $2,231.41-plus, you could have spent it on other things that would have added value to the economy. Instead that value is lost to you and given to whichever group of lobbyists can donate the most to this year’s re-election campaigns or deliver the largest voter block.

As I said before, biotech subsidies will create jobs and help the economy of Massachusetts. But as I hope you can now see, those jobs will cost a half-billion dollars that would have improved your standard of living, and made all our lives, not just those with postgraduate degrees in biology, better.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].