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George Will, Slippery Slope

Unequal unfairness

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Maryland has passed a law aimed specifically at corporations with more than 10,000 employees that fail to provide health benefits to fiscally significant portions of their workforce (and thus burden the state's real welfare system). Not surprisingly, of the four corporations that fall under the new law, only Wal-Mart falls short. According to the *Washington Post*:

Wal-Mart says that more than three-quarters of its sales associates have health insurance but acknowledged that some of its low-wage workers are on Medicaid, the state insurance program for the poor. Wal-Mart's not providing even the 21st Century version of benefits (that is to say, extremely reduced) to some of its workforce, constitutes, according to the Maryland legislature, a kind of corporate welfare; they are receiving a benefit but doing nothing to earn it. The state has to pick up the cost of Wal-Mart doing business (or figure out some other way of paying for the healthcare of those of Wal-Mart's workers and their children). Under the new law, passed over a veto, they have asked that Wal-Mart pick up the slack.

Maybe it's wrong to treat some corporate monoliths less equally than others, as George Will today writes, but the frothy eagerness with which he presses his case makes that argument hard to assess. He responds to the Maryland legislature by claiming that Wal-Mart's benefits are substantial and generous: a fact he had already denied–it's not a welfare state (i.e., a corporation that pays out benefits)–and not even Wal-Mart is willing to assert. Rather than dwell on the generosity of the benefits, or the principled view that low wage workers do not deserve benefits, Will opts for the ridiculous libertarian classic: the slippery slope:

Maryland's new law is, The Post says, "a legislative mugging masquerading as an act of benevolent social engineering." And the mugging of profitable businesses may be just beginning. The threshold of 10,000 employees can be lowered by knocking off a zero. Then two. The 8 percent requirement can be raised. It might be raised in Maryland if, as is possible, Wal-Mart's current policies almost reach it.

The dumb thing about this argument is that it's just one tweak away from being cogent. Rather than alleging that any law aimed at a corporate monolith could one day be aimed at the small businessman, Will could argue that as a matter of fairness, other employers ought to be required to bear healthcare costs.

Even dumber, however, is the claim that such a taxing of a corporate giant is somehow on par with actual illegal corruption:

 Meanwhile, people who are disgusted — and properly so — about corruption inside the Beltway should ask themselves this: Is it really worse than the kind of rent-seeking, and theft tarted up as compassion, just witnessed 20 miles east of the Beltway, in Annapolis?

No. It is not worse. The behavior of an elected body even in the perhaps imprudent exercise of its power to tax is quite unlike the demonstrably corrupt and illegal behavior of leading Republican politicians and lobbyists. Quite unlike it indeed.

George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi

Bathwater

The fallacy of *Ignoratio elenchi* is so named because the arguer shows a manifest ignorance of the direction of the argument. Usually his evidence suggests a mild conclusion, but he opts instead for something more radical. Here’s a good example:

>The way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government’s role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity. People serious about reducing the role of money in politics should be serious about reducing the role of politics in distributing money. But those most eager to do the former — liberals, generally — are the least eager to do the latter.

It’s obvious by the mention of “liberals” that this is our dear friend George Will. In light of this observation, he offers two suggestions: congressional term limits or “the philosophical renewal of conservativism.” Congressional term limits will, he argues (and he’s probably right) never take place; the philosophical renewal of conservatism, by which he means something like the Grover Norquist drown the federal government in a bathtub variety, appears to be the only other option.

This obviously false dichotomy ignores the less extreme (and therefore more probable) solution: elect and hold accountable representatives who do not prostitute themselves or otherwise cluelessly (even if good-heartedly) waste taxpayer money. Maybe our readers might suggest some names. But I’m certain that such public servants exist in great numbers.

Even though Will correctly asserts that lobbying is a constitutionally protected activity, no one is thereby forced to listen to a lobbyist.

George Will

Stupid Tax

The stupid tax is what you pay when you fail to put money in a parking meter. I think it ought to be extended to people who publish dumb arguments, such as the one we find today in *The Washington Post* from our favorite author, George Will. At issue is the explicit moralizing of the tax code–taxing or otherwise excluding from tax benefits industries that promote certain vices–gambling, hot-tubbing, among other things. The absurd reality of the selective tax-code moralizing probably even turns out to be dumber (and more inconsistent) than Will suggests.

But that’s not really the point. Will argues that the problem with such silly moralizing consists in government’s engaging in, of all things, speech:

>But do we really want to march down this road paved with moral pronouncements? When government uses subsidies to moralize, as with tax preferences for bonds that can be used to finance this but not that, government is speaking. It is expressing opinions about what is and is not wholesome. And once government starts venting such opinions, how does it stop?

If you’re wondering what “government” means, you’re not alone. As far as we know, the government responsible for the tax code is that government so frequently re-elected by the people. Theoretically, people of every party elect them to represent them–often they are even called “representatives.” Part of this representation involves the crafting of laws to reflect, or to represent the will of the interests that elect them. Some of these interests are “moral” ones. And so they engage in all sorts of moralizing with laws (don’t do this or that, or you’ll be fined or otherwise punished). The tax code is a subset of this explicit moralizing. Taxes are one (often unfortunate) means of doing this.

As for the slippery slope problem Will alleges to abide in such behavior: such moralizing stops when the moralizers violate constitutional protections or, as is more likely to be the case, don’t get re-elected (or perhaps get indicted).

Plain Bad Arguments

Deposuit potentes

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Part of the trouble with op-eding is the failure to distinguish “analysis” from “advocacy.” This is even worse when the analyzer has a strongly ideological bent, such as, for instance, another of liberal NPR’s underrpresented conservative think-tankers, Joseph Loconte. In today’s *New York Times* Loconte argues that the Democrats are mistaken to adopt the Republican strategy of reaching out to Christians.

What stands for argument here, however, are some cherry-picked newsy tidbits that try to establish an equivalence between the Republicans’ taliban-style theocrats (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, among others) and the Democrats’ “progressive” or “liberal” Christians, such as James Wallis. Here is the crux of the argument for equivalence:

>”We affirm God’s vision of a good society offered to us by the prophet Isaiah,” he writes. Yet Isaiah, an agent of divine judgment living in a theocratic state, conveniently affirms every spending scheme of the Democratic Party. This is no different than the fundamentalist impulse to cite the book of Leviticus to justify laws against homosexuality.

No different! Loconte offers no argument for this other than the flimsy claim that because Isaiah lived in a theocratic state, this must mean that Wallis wants to as well. Much more indeed would be needed in any case to establish the logical equivalence of Wallis’s view with that of the Republican party. For the sake of brevity, I’ll mention two obvious ones. The reader can certainly add many more.

First, Wallis would have to make the foundational claim that Christianity grounds the American state in an exclusive way (e.g., this is a Christian country and a Christian party). One might remember a leading Republican once called Jesus his favorite *political philosopher*.

Second, Wallis should not be willing or able to support non-Christian arguments for his position. The position he affirms, or so one can even gather from Loconte’s thinly sourced piece, is that Wallis thinks people of Christian faith should not consider themselves *ipso facto* Republicans. The Democratic position, according to Wallis, is *also* Christian, perhaps even very Christian (and by the way, we gather Wallis has a more serious argument than Loconte’s uncharitable portrayal suggests), but it’s not exclusively Christian.

So just because one group of ideologically fundamentalist Christians pollutes our democracy with their theocratic intolerance, it doesn’t follow that any religiously motivated partisan politics shares the same narrow vision simply by virtue of being religious.

Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, V.D.Hanson

Film criticism

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Those crazy Hollywood liberals are at it again, argues Victor Davis Hanson, historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (one of National Public Radio’s many underrepresented conservative institutions). For in Hollywood, Hanson argues, “the politically correct impulse now overrides all else.” Such a conclusion is as hyperbolic as it is unsupported by evidence–in this case, three recent and fairly successful films involving discussion of terrorism of the fictional or historical kind (*Flightplan*, *Syriana*, and *Munich*). Hanson obviously neglects the existence of a whole subgenre of television shows and movies featuring cartoonish Islamic super-villains as well as ideologically pure American super heroes.

The spectacular boneheadedness of his argument doesn’t consist only in his willful neglect of countervailing evidence, but in his implicit claim that, one, the three films may be read as a consistent policy statement of a single group (“Hollywood producers”), and more dumbly, terrorism exists in only one form (so *Munich* and *Syriana* and *Flightplan* are about the same thing). Only in light of these two assumptions would it make any sense for Hanson to counter what he takes to be the argument of, for instance, *Syrianna* with an argument of his own:

>”Syriana” also perverts historical reality. Everything connected with the oil industry is portrayed as corrupt and exploitive, with no hint that petroleum fuels civilization. Hollywood producers might not see many oil rigs off the Malibu coast, but someone finds and delivers them gas each morning for their luxury cars.

Hanson should be reminded that *Syriana* is a fictional film, the product of one director and a handful of producers (not “Hollywood producers” in general). He should also be told that some Hollywood producer’s Malibu home and luxury car does not invalidate the argument of another Hollywood producer (even if he has a luxury car and a Malibu home). That’s what you call *ad hominem*.

The fine fellows at the Hoover institution should do as we do: look in the op-ed pages of our nations major national publications for silly arguments and leave the movies to Roger Ebert.

George Will

It’s not pristine

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Speaking of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Former Senator from Alaska (and present day Governor) Frank Murkowski, on the floor of Congress, said that ANWR is

>”flat, it’s unattractive, it’s not pristine — this is what it looks like. Don’t be misinformed.”

In a similar vein, George Will writes:

>Few opponents of energy development in what they call “pristine” ANWR have visited it. Those who have and who think it is “pristine” must have visited during the 56 days a year when it is without sunlight. They missed the roads, stores, houses, military installations, airstrip and school. They did not miss seeing the trees in area 1002. There are no trees.

A marked improvement over the former Senator. But not visiting ANWR doesn’t disqualify one from speaking of it; the absence of trees in an *arctic* area (and the presence of a small number of humans) doesn’t disqualify it from being “pristine.” By the way, *Post* editors and Mr.Will, “pristine” means “in original condition” (whatever that condition might be–cold, boring or even treeless). Determining what might deserve this designation will perhaps be a matter of reasonable disagreement. But there seems to be little doubt that ANWR qualifies.

More inane than the pristine confusion, however, is Will’s claim that

>But for many opponents of drilling in the refuge, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.

No evidence (not even the usual straw man kind of evidence) is offered for this claim. He continues:

>For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society’s politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

In addition to the lack of evidence, no actual people are named. Will can usually muster up a few badly misinterpretated arguers or arguments to make his outlandish claims. But here no one.

>The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society’s balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism — of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America — is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals’ lives. This is done in the name of equality.

And so what started as an argument about the proper disposition of *federal* property, has ended with the claim that objections to its privatization are motivated by a desire to control individual choices and expand government supervision over individuals’ lives. We’ll not bother with the grand conspiracy claim that concludes the argument–liberals are trying to create energy scarcity (fuel efficiency anyone?)–we’ve already wasted too much time on this psuedo-intellectual pablam.

George Will

Just Opposition

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Among Aristotle’s many innovations in logic, the square of opposition illustrates logical opposites–contradictories to be exact; these relationships obtain of all general categorical statements. As introductory logic students often learn, most phrases outside of logic textbooks do not behave so logically and some–at times significant–translation is required. Take for instance the following contrast:

>Federal assistance to institutions of higher education was about $35 billion last year, so the schools flinch from the price tag on their gay rights principles, which in this case dovetail neatly with their anti-military prejudices. *The schools cite the principle that government cannot condition receipt of a government benefit on the loss of a constitutional right. The government replies that Congress frequently makes the receipt of federal funds conditional on the recipient’s doing certain things to further a legitimate government interest, such as recruiting.*

The italicized part is the alleged opposition. Before we get to that, I should note that it will come as no surprise to readers of George Will that the entire weight of his column falls on the government’s side and that his portrayal of what he takes to be the “academic” position is an obvious distortion (he doesn’t even bother to cite–let alone quote out of context–one of their arguments). It’s also not surprising that the column is peppered with the usual (and groundless) conservative attack line on the privilege of academia (my students–especially the many veterans of recent foreign entanglements will express surprise at his claims). My colleagues urge me not to bother with such arguments, and my friends tell me I expect too much of people. In deference to them I’ll not bother with these and other logical outrages.

The opposition, however, merits some brief attention. The school’s position rests on the claim that Miltary’s distinctions among types of people in recruiting is unconstitutional (some law students would not be welcome at their table simply in virtue of who they are). The government’s position as presented by Will hardly opposes this. Just because congress can make people do things for federal funds doesn’t mean that it can make people do anything or restrict their constitutional rights. The question–for the schools–is one of civil rights. Violations of civil rights by the government do not constitute a “legitimate” interest–such violations can never be legitimate as they violate the constitution. To insist they do simply begs the question (presumes what you’re trying to show) against the schools.

In the end, the government might have a good argument. But for their sake I hope that this isn’t it.

George Will

Dura Lex

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Some arguments are just tiresome; it’s getting so boring pointing out the childishness of the following that in future perhaps we’ll simply link and refer as *res iudicata*. So, maybe for the last time, here’s a classic fallacious argument. Citing the deceased Henry J.Friendly’s unpublished opinion on abortion, George Will writes,

>The assertion of such a privacy right would, he said, invalidate “a great variety” of statutes that existed when the 14th Amendment was adopted — e.g., those against attempted suicide, bestiality, even drug use.

And the child screams: you said I have a right to privacy, so anything I do privately, including crimes, is protected by the constitution. Nope. An assertion of a right to privacy is merely an invitation to the clueless to raise such objections.

More to the point, in the same article, we see yet another variation on the “subverting the democratic process argument” against *Roe*:

>The day after Roe was decided, the New York Times called it a “resolution” of the abortion issue. Not really. Roe short-circuited a democratic process of accommodating abortion differences — a process that had produced a larger increase in the number of legal abortions in the three years before the Roe decision than were to occur in the three years after.

First, for good or for ill, *Roe* answered a constitutional question; as a branch of a democratic government, duly appointed according to procedures outlined in the *Constitution of the United States of America* the Supreme Court of the United States embodied a democratic process as it always does. Second, a vigorous debate has taken place ever since (as well as a terrorist campaign of violent extremists). Third, democratic processes have played around the edges of the issue ever since (primarily restrictions and limitations on funding and so forth). Finally, the very democratic process of a constitutional amendment has always remained.

To assert then, as Will and Friendly do, that the occurrence of all of the vigorous democracy was the product of an unwise decision makes one wonder what they have in mind by “democratic process.”

George Will

Feigned Praise

Living in a democracy constantly reminds one of the views and the tastes of others, or at least it should. Among the many (and no, David, there are not just two) reactions to this sometimes unpleasant fact are the following: (1) search for the source–the motivation, the justification, the history, you name it–of the disagreeable (to you) belief; or (2) don’t search out the source, but rather make up a dumb story. If this were a moral imperative (and considering how often we’ve run into it on this page it might as well be), it would run something like this: act as if the maxim of your opponent’s belief is really stupid. Since your views are opposite their stupid ones, you must therefore be smart.

Worse than acting on this perverted maxim, is using it to praise others. And so, in praise of Mitch Daniels, George Will writes:

>Ending bottled water for employees of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (annual savings, $35,000). Ending notification of drivers that their licenses are expiring; letting them be responsible for noticing (saving $200,000). Buying rather than renting floor mats for BMV offices (saving $267,000 this year). Initiating the sale of 2,096 surplus state vehicles (so far, $1.95 million in revenue from 1,514 sales). Changing the state lottery’s newsletter from semimonthly and in color to a monthly and black-and-white (annual savings, $21,670). And so on, and on, agency by agency.

All of those seem like reasonable budget-cutting measures. But,

>Such matters might be dismissed by liberals who think government spending is an index of government “caring,” and perhaps by a new sect called “national greatness conservatives” who regard Daniels’s kind of parsimony as a small-minded, cheeseparing exercise unworthy of government’s great and stately missions. But it seems to be an Indiana approach.

Who are these liberals? Who are these conservatives? To Will, it doesn’t matter. Sure, you may find one or two liberals (and perhaps the same number of conservatives) who hold these views. Why argue against *them*? Their view is a strawman of itself. Will (and Daniels) perhaps should consider the fiscally responsible type liberal–the ones who didn’t advocate expensive foreign entanglements among other things.

Contrary to Will’s attempted encomium, we can only assume that Mr.Daniels has good reasons for his beliefs.

Charles Krauthammer

Argumentum ad Statuam

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If Charles Krauthammer is to be believed, the proliferation of statues of various foreign *liberators* (Ireland, India, Uruguay, Ukraine, Bolivia, among others) not only makes Washington unique as a capitol (the only negative comparison he mentions is–hold on to your hats–France) from the rest of the capitols of the world, but it also shows “America’s devotion to liberty. Liberty not just here but everywhere. Indeed, liberty for its own sake.”

That we love liberty for its own sake–whatever that means–can hardly be demonstrated by statues of specific individuals littering our nation’s capital. As we have seen with our own eyes, other nations decorate the plazas, streets, and parks of their capitals with similar statues (but they’re not devoted to liberty–since they’re not Americans). Besides, the mere fact that the figures mentioned were “liberators” hardly means that they loved American style *liberty* (whatever one means by that).

The weird thing about this argument is that since real deeds of real American leaders have posed rhetorical challenges greater than which Krauthammer can conceive, he hopes patriotic sentiment generated by a Lee Greenwood (“I’m proud to be an American) guided tour of monumental Washington (and New York) demonstrates the purity of our intentions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But don’t just listen to the statues, listen to the “the overwhelming majority of Americans” who “refuse to believe” that our motives are anything but pure and [w]hatever their misgivings about the cost and wisdom of these wars, they know how deep and authentic is the American devotion to liberty.”

We do love liberty, but many find our devotion to it deeply mysterious. To them our intentions demonstrate nothing–they see only what we do. Perhaps rather than insisting on the goodness of our intentions, we should wonder about the wisdom of our actions.