One of the most revealing indicators of someone’s economic worldview is what they think of gross domestic product (GDP). Those who favor central control, government intervention, and redistribution tend to begin with everything they think is wrong with it. Walk into any liberal university’s economics classroom, especially a political economy course, and within minutes you'd see just what I'm talking about.

Which brings us to France, where the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron is taking shape between the country’s far left and far right. Over the weekend, far-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered a speech criticizing GDP, the standard measure of a country’s economic output, commonly calculated by adding up final spending on goods and services produced within its borders.

If anything, the speech offers a preview of where France could be headed within the next year, a country already drowning under the weight of its redistributionist welfare state, with an industrial sector crippled by the cost of all that generosity.

"So, they have the GDP, gross domestic product. I dig a hole, the GDP increases. I fill it in, the GDP increases. I get in my car, I hit a wall, the GDP increases, to rebuild the wall and rebuild the car. Plus, the GDP of drugs," Mélenchon said, according to a translation. "The GDP is nothing. It's a valuation in value."

You’re likely to hear the same sort of speech in a liberal college classroom or from an American politician arguing that GDP is unreliable because it doesn’t measure truly productive economic activity. The point, in most cases, is to redefine success: dismiss strong GDP growth as “unproductive” when it doesn’t fit the agenda, and wave away declining GDP when redistribution leaves a country like France with a weaker economy.

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Mélenchon’s criticism of GDP runs into an argument laid out in 1850 by another Frenchman, one of vastly superior intellect: Frédéric Bastiat. In his essay That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, Bastiat explains what became known as the broken-window fallacy through the story of a boy who breaks a shopkeeper’s window. Onlookers find a silver lining: the repair will generate business for the glazier. 

What they fail to consider is what the shopkeeper could have done with that money had the window remained intact. The repair creates visible economic activity. The lost opportunity is less visible: money spent replacing the window can no longer go toward expanding the business, hiring an employee, or buying something else. The shopkeeper pays to restore what he already had rather than acquire something new. Destruction does not create prosperity.

But that confusion is hardly confined to the French. Criticism of GDP spans the political spectrum, from Elizabeth Warren and members of the Democratic Socialists of America to former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Closer to home, those include Vice President JD Vance in his latest book, Communion, while Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have voiced objections of their own.

At the heart of these objections is the claim that GDP fails to capture real economic progress, or, increasingly, someone’s preferred definition of virtue. It was never meant to measure the latter. That, however, is not a defect in the measure of GDP, that is a defect in the politician who demands that an economic measure validate their own political agenda.