In the last week of October, Sallie James of Cato and I taped a segment with John Stossel. The whole show is up on line and the segment we are on starts at about the 29:45 point and goes to about the 36:00 point. We deal with whether jobs per se are good, whether Mitt Romney’s opposition to starting banks in garages is justified, and whether bailouts of auto companies are good.

Early in the segment, Stossel shows various people claiming that a benefit of natural disasters is the jobs it creates. One of the people they show is, I’m pretty sure, my former colleague at the Naval Postgraduate School, Nayantara Hensel. She’s now the U.S. Navy’s chief economist. She’s a pretty sharp economist and so wonder if her comment was taken out of context.