All posts by Colin Anderson

Bad Explanations, Fallacies and Other Problems, False Cause, General discussion, George Will

He Almost Made It

1 Comment

George Will wouldn't let us down and make it through a column without an awful argument. Last three sentences in a column, that on a cursory reading at least was not that unreasonable. Throughout most of the column, he lambasts Obama for liberal opportunism, cynical budget manipulation, and his lack of qualifications for his job, all of which seems mildly cheap. But then he comes through for us:

One afternoon last week, cable news viewers saw, at the top of their screens, the president launching yet another magnificent intention — the disassembly and rearrangement of the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. The bottom of their screens showed the Dow plunging 281 points. Surely the top of the screen partially explained the bottom. 

I can't say whether there is such a causal relationship between Obama's speech and the Dow Industrial drop, but I worry a bit that Will is confusing MSNBC's immediate feedback stuff with the Dow Industrial Averages.

Argument Analysis, Begging the Question, Fallacies and Other Problems, Michael Gerson

Coercion and Complicity

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I'm not quite sure that I understand the complicity argument that has sprung up among some of those who lost the election and who are upset at Obama's policies. Gerson gave a particularly virulent formulation of it today:

There is a common thread running through President Obama's pro-choice agenda: the coercion of those who disagree with it.

. . . .

Now, taxpayers are likely to fund not only research on the "spare" embryos from in vitro fertilization but also on human lives produced and ended for the sole purpose of scientific exploitation. Biotechnicians have been freed from the vulgar moralism of the masses, so they can operate according to the vulgar utilitarianism of their own social clique — the belief that some human lives can be planted, plucked and processed for the benefit of others. It is the incurable itch of pro-choice activists to compel everyone's complicity in their agenda. Somehow, getting "politics out of science" translates into taxpayer funding for embryo experimentation. "Choice" becomes a demand on doctors and nurses to violate their deepest beliefs or face discrimination.

The argument seems to be that the fact that some people of conscience disagree with a certain policy on moral grounds presumptively legitimates the conclusion that the policy should not be enacted. The argument seems to be

1. People of conscience are free to have their own moral beliefs.

2. Freedom of moral belief entails (requires) that one is not "forced" to act counter to one's moral belief.

3. Therefore a policy that "forces" you to act indirectly against your moral belief is wrong.

4. Paying taxes to support an activity that runs counter to your moral beliefs is being "forced" to act counter to your moral beliefs.

5. [Therefore the government is wrong to spend money on activities that run counter to some people's moral belief.]

Gerson, being the moral relativist that he is, relativizes the difference in moral views to "social cliques" and then suggests that the government has no business intervening in this matter of taste–non disputandum gustibus I guess. Gerson makes that Nietzschean mistake of confusing sneering at those who disagree with you with argument against their position.Gerson and others can, of course, take the route many others of serious moral conscience have gone before. But, I can't see how it follows that a government cannot make any law legitimately that would be conscientiously objected to by a "social clique" even if we drink the radical relativist kool-aid with Gerson.

But, it seems to me that there is ultimatley something worrisome about Gerson's notions of "coercion" and "complicity" here. This argument may not seem fallacious as such. He is, of cousre, entitled to define coercion this broadly. But it overloads his premises, and, because he does not make explicit the real claim that he is making here, it seems to come close to begging the question. He is at least using emotionally loaded terms in order to persuade the reader without adequate justification of the wrongness of Obama's order. (Begging the question seems too strong here, better would be a fallacy of loading the key term of the argument.)

I'm really fascinated by the concept of complicity, though I can't say that I understand what the conditions for complicity would be. At the same time I don't think we can do without a fairly robust notion, at least, in our moral thinking. But, the sort of argument that Gerson is trotting out here, seems to be the argument of the defeated: No longer able to argue against fairly overwhelming democratic and popular support for the policy, no longer able to enforce their view by fiat, they claim that any policy is the result of an "incurable itch of [pro-choice] activists to compel everyone's complicity in their agenda."

General discussion

Responsible Science, Irresponsible Pundits

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Think Progress has a nice post about Glenn Beck's comments on Obama's stem cell order.

BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

 It's pretty hard to parse this rant and find anything like an argument in it, but he seems be suggesting:

1. Progressives advocated eugenics in the past.

2. Eugenics led us to the Final Solution and to goal of creating a master race and a perfect person.

3. Obama is a progressive.

4 [Implicit, I guess] It is likely that Obama as a progressive will advocate eugenics which will lead to the Master RAce.

5. Therefore, Obama's executive order should be opposed.

That's just the best that I can make out of the addled thoughts of Beck. He seems to fallaciously argue by analogy from Obama being a progressive and supporting stem cell research to the likelihood that Obama is endorsing eugenics, and therefore, slippery slopily, will end up supporting the Master Race.

The factual ignorance underlying this argument is staggering. All that Obama has done is reverse the limitation of the use of federal funds to the 20 or so lines that were already in existence at the time Bush signed his 2001 order:

To the delight of patients’ groups and scientists, the order will allow research on hundreds of stem cell lines already in existence, as well as ones yet to be created, typically from embryos left over from fertility treatments that would otherwise be discarded. (NYT, 3/8/09)

There is little reason to believe that this will initiate the slippery slope to the Master Race.

It is interesting to compare this argument with Krauthammer's more measured slippery slope argument against research cloning of embryos. (The fullest version was in the New Republic (there's a link here to it)). There he argues only that there is a need for some line to be drawn that protects embryos from being reduced to mere material and that the line is reasonably drawn at research cloning (creating embryos for research purposes)).

Setting aside the fact that the Obama's executive order does not authorize funding for research cloning (research cloning is not illegal in the US, though the use of federal funds for it is banned by the Dickey-Wicker amendment originally passed in the mid-90's), it seems possible to me to argue that there is some slipperiness to the slope and that at some point we may find ourselves having allowed morally disturbing cases. But, if the argument depends on the likelihood of this being the first step in an ineluctable process to the Master Race, then that just seems intellectually irresponsible at best.

Bad Explanations, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Post hoc ergo propter, Unclassifiable, Weak Analogy

Where’s Foucault when we need him?

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George Will's been taking a beating lately–His character, his general ignorance of that of which he comments upon, and, our favorite, his logic have all come under increasing attack recently. Today we can give him a pass on his column. Its silliness is not entirely his fault. For some reason he devotes his column to fawning over the relatively uninteresting analogy between past sexual morality and the supposed moralizing about food by one expert in philosophy at the Hoover institute, Nancy Eberhardt who we are told by Will is "intimidatingly intelligent."

The idea seems to be that in the past we moralized sex, but left food to be a mere matter of taste. Now we moralize food, but leave sex to be a mere matter of taste. I think probably both claims are false, though I'm willing to bite that we have stopped moralizing a lot of sex, and some moralize a lot of their choices involving food.

But, then we run into this sort of confusion:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can. In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

In heavy-handed contrast:

Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

And again:

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

And to beat the horse within an inch of its life:

Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that, for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and doesn’t like.

And to make it clearer still:

As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.  

Fortunately she doesn't draw any substantial conclusions from this. With that sort of genial Brooksy, "foibles of the human race exposing, concealed smirk," she contents herself with running this analogy to its exhaustion while ignoring relevant points of disanalogy, and doing little more than pointing out this curious social change, which perhaps seems to be neither curious, nor a social change, with closer scrutiny. But she closes with this whopper of a post hoc propter hoc fallacy wrapped in a bacony strip of psychoanalyzing explanation and deep-fried in a vat of greasy rhetorical questions:

The rise of a recognizably Kantian, morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics, veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western world during these same years. 

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not. 

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I find it surprisingly easy to avoid this conclusion. 

 

George Will, Inexplicable, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Things that are false, Unclassifiable

Indescribable

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Will repeats his performance this weekend with a bizarre attack on the stimulus spending. There are three things that are sticking in Will's craw:

  Brian Tierney is CEO of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which publishes Philadelphia's Inquirer and Daily News and has missed loan payments since June. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell's spokesman says Tierney has had "a number of conversations" with Rendell about receiving state money that "could come from a number of revenue streams."

He spends about a third of the column attacking this request–why he's doing it is not at all clear. Perhaps we should conclude "Not all spending requests are equally good." But, this doesn't seem to be much of a headline. Maybe I'm missing something here.

 Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat, practiced law for three years, then entered elective office at 29 and has never left, so when he speaks about a world larger than a legislature, and about entities more enmeshed in life's grinding imperatives, he says strange things. Objecting to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler opposing more severe fuel-economy and emissions standards, he says: "They have not yet stopped being controlled by their own self-interest."

This is followed by some equally random sneering at Waxman for supporting the loans to the auto company and emissions standards. I guess in Will's confused mind, the problem with the auto industry is the threat of increased fuel-economy standards. At least, that's the only way I can parse this rambling kvetch.

"Never," Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said when voting against the stimulus, "have so few spent so much so quickly to do so little." Three of his contentions are correct. The $787 billion price tag is probably at least two-thirds too low: Add the cost of borrowing to finance it, and allow for the certainty that many "temporary" programs will become permanent, and the price soars far above $2 trillion.

But Cole's last contention is wrong. The stimulus, which the Congressional Budget Office says will, over the next 10 years, reduce GDP by crowding out private investment, already is doing a lot by fostering cynicism in the service of opportunism.

And he ends, like he did this weekend, with an easily debunked misrepresentation.  The C.B.O. report is here . It claims that after raising GDP between 1-4% for the next couple of years (and creating 1.3-3.9 million jobs), the effect of the stimulus over the next decade will decrease. Ultimately in 2019 the increased debt will "crowd out" private investment (i.e. capital will have been attracted to government debt rather than private investment) and this will (may?) reduce the GDP by 0.1-0.3%. Yes that is 1/10 of 1 percent reduction. 

I don't see any real problem of logic here, indeed I'm not sure I see any logic whatsoever. Somehow, Will seems to want to suggest that the stimulus bill is some sort of hothouse of "opportunistic" spending. But, these two little vignettes don't go very far to do that. The first might be an illustration of that opportunism, by the second, Will seems to have forgotten what his column was about and the third is just warmed-over blogo-babble that has been discredited. How the editors of the Post ignore the stench of these columns just baffles me.

Appeal to the People, Fallacies and Other Problems, George Will, Red Herring, Straw Man

Phoning it in

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George Will phones it in today with a boiler-plate global warming denying column.

There really isn't anything of interest in the column, though I found myself wondering why it is that the particular argument he recites have any probative relevance to the question of global warming.

The occasion for his cutting and pasting was some remarks by Secretary of Energy Chu on the likely disruption and ultimate disappearance of agriculture in California if global warming continues unchecked.

After blithely ignoring any evidence for Chu's claim, or even (of course) accurately representing them, Will trots out several predictions that proved, it seems, to be false: Global Cooling and Ehrlich's bet about the price of commodities.

Both have not come true, though one wonders whether it is the prediction itself that has failed to come true or the time-frame of the prediction. 

But, even if we assume that both of the underlying claims are false–that the earth was entering a cooling phase in the 1970's and that there will be shortages of non-renewable commodities in the future, what does that tell us about Chu's worries? Neither failure tells us anything about the degree to which we should trust climate science and the consensus around the general theory of anthropogenic climate change. They are essentially irrelevant.(What's the best description of these fallacies? Red Herrings?)

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Deniers love to claim that every local short term climate change is advanced as "evidence of man-made global warming," despite the frequent denials by climate scientists that the case rests on local short term climate variations. (Yes, the media often represents climate science this way, but that cannot be taken to be an accurate representaiton of climate science). Nevertheless, it provides a nice straw man for Will to defeat. 

An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy. 

Seems to me that this is not an unstated premise, but a pretty explicit claim–that human life has come to thrive within a tiny window of climate variation and that it will not thrive if dramatic change occurs. This is a nice rhetorical move, but seems to be some sort of straw man as well.

Because of today's economy, another law — call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities — is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

This paragraph just beggars even Will's limited rational capacities! The argument seems to be that  a short term calamity make you less concerned about long term calamities. It would seem to be true: if I break my leg, I will worry more about getting this healed, than lowering my cholesterol. But my elevated cholesterol may still be the thing that kills me in the long term. It isn't clear what Will thinks we should conclude from this, but all of the things I can conceive as possibilities, seem remarkably silly. I suppose that this is some sort of ad populum fallacy.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.

The last claim–if it is true–might provide some reason to accept Will's cautioning. Perhaps someone can find this assertion here.

General discussion

More Argumentum ad Obamam

Richard Cohen jumps on the "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" bandwagon.

Taken individually, the tax problems of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the health and human services secretary-designate, Tom Daschle, don't amount to much. Together, though, they amount to a message: If you are beloved by this administration, you don't necessarily have to play by the rules. Both Geithner and Daschle are good men, but their appointments send the message that Washington's new broom sweeps a bit like the old one.

Which old broom exactly?

 But if the money is going to be offered, why not couple it with demands for reform? After all, without the extra cash, the likelihood is that teachers across the country will be laid off. That gives the president some leverage: Take my money, take my reforms. Maybe a deal could not be done. We won't know. We do know, though, that the teachers unions have an understandable aversion to some reforms. We also know that the unions supported Obama in his campaign. 

But that's not enough. Apparently, the administration apparently is supposed to reform all the sectors of the economy that it is going to fund prior to stimulating the economy. The passage ends with a nice innuendo that the real reason there is no reform tied to these dollars is the support of unions–rather than say the desire to get spending in the economy as quickly as possible (an aim that might be criticized on its own grounds).

 How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with the No Child Left Behind law but insisting that testing — accountability — be maintained? How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching. The pay is lousy, and the work can be hard. Can $100 billion do something about that? Could be.

Yes, how about "tinkering" with No Child Left Behind–that's certainly some serious policy suggestions from Cohen–hopefully the administration will jump right on that. This wouldn't seem to be fallacious, but there is something repugnant in Cohen's vague and unsupported analysis here. His criticism seems to be just that we could have some change to education along with stimulus dollars. That's about as substantive as his comments get. 

And I may be wrong about this, but my recollection is that much of this is provided as money to the state, one of which at least is planning on doing some of these things.

An opportunity has been missed. I can appreciate the need to move things quickly and to avoid unnecessary political fights — teachers unions know how to fight — but the explosive energy of "change" is being lost. Hit rewind. It's not too late to get it back.

 

Argument Analysis, General discussion

I’m probably missing something here

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Amity Shlaes seems to be the anti-Roosevelt scholar du jour.Today she explains why Roosevelt's economic policy should not be the model for Obama's recovery efforts.

Beginning with an anecdote about the continued economic woes in 1937, she raises the question of the effectiveness of Roosevelt's policies, given that there were still economic problems 4 years after his policies began. But she gives us two reasons for the concern with Roosevelt's economics.

But Roosevelt the economist is unworthy of emulation. His first goal was to reduce unemployment. Of his own great stimulus package, the National Industrial Recovery Act, he said: "The law I have just signed was passed to put people back to work." Here, FDR failed abysmally. In the 1920s, unemployment had averaged below 5 percent. Blundering when they knew better, Herbert Hoover, his Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Congress drove that rate up to 25 percent. Roosevelt pulled unemployment down, but nowhere near enough to claim sustained recovery. From 1933 to 1940, FDR's first two terms, it averaged in the high teens. Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do, Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That's a level Obama has referred to once or twice — as a nightmare. 

Maybe I'm missing something really important here, but isn't a 30% drop in the unemployment rate a success? Never mind a 120% drop, if you count in work relief? What am I missing here? Is it unreasonable to expect that a stimulus bill of the same magnitude (proportional to GDP) would effect a proportional decrease in unemployment? The numbers that I think I saw the last couple of weeks from the CBO suggested as much. So what is the argument here? That, stimulus spending can make improve things, but perhaps not fix everything? Is that a reason to not emulate Roosevelt? Starting from 25% unemployment and getting it down to 10% cannot be compared to Obama worrying about 10% and presumably spending to decrease it to 6-7%.

This seems to be a version of the argument, if policy x aims to address problem y, and policy x does not fix problem y, then policy x should not be undertaken. This may be a good argument in some cases (where we have a choice between two policies and one will solve y and one won't), or, if it were combined with evidence that some other policy z would better affect problem y. But as it stands it seems a bit bizarre.

But that's not all:

The second goal of the New Deal was to stimulate the private sector. Instead, it supplanted it. To justify their own work, New Dealers attacked not merely those guilty of white-collar crimes but the entire business community — the "princes of property," FDR called them. Washington's policy evolved into a lethal combo of spending and retribution. Never did either U.S. investors or foreigners get a sense that the United States was now open for business. As a result, the Depression lasted half a decade longer than it had to, from 1929 to 1940 rather than, say, 1929 to 1936. The Dow Jones industrial average didn't return to its summer 1929 high until 1954. The monetary shock of the first years of the Depression was immense, but it was this duration that made the Depression Great. 

It's hard to judge this assertion. It isn't really an argument. Rather than justify the claim that the New Deal crowded out the private sector, she suggests that the New Deal was motivated by hostility to the private sector ("went after. . . the entire business community"). Next she asserts that because of this hostility to business, investors did not invest in the US, and so the Depression lasted longer than it would have on some other Deal.

She finds several cautionary tales in the Roosevelt record (short term vs. long term job growth, and possible problems with public investment in utilities), but ultimately the history seems to be less than is needed to support her assertion.

What about spending? The Depression tells us that public works are probably less effective than improving the environment for entrepreneurs and new companies. The president has already put forward a big tax cut for lower earners. He might offer a commensurate one for higher earners. He might expand the tax advantages he is currently offering to companies — wider expensing of losses, for example — and make them permanent. A discussion that permits the word "trillion" might also include the possibility of bringing down U.S. corporate taxes, taxes on interest, dividend and capital gains — again, permanently. The cash that a relatively competitive United States draws from abroad will move the country forward faster than any stimulus.

Economic arguments like this seem to require more than just history to justify the conclusion. It's not clear to me how the depression could tell us what she thinks it tells us, at most we would need to compare it to some other Great Depression in which tax cuts were tried and in which the economy recovered more effectively. It seems to me that the arguments about how to understand the Great Depression ultimately rely on economic theory or hypothesis, more than historical anecdote.

 I'm not sure that I would call this fallacious (though there is a specter of several fallacies haunting the piece). but it seems to me that the history she draws our attention to, at best would illustrate a theoretical view (spending is less effective than tax cuts at stimulus) that she holds on the basis of some other evidence which she has chosen not to make explicit. She suggests however that the historical record provides good reason to hold that theoretical view.

Accident, Argument Analysis, Fallacies and Other Problems, General discussion, Informal Fallacies, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Krugman

I’m not an economist

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Since I'm not an economist, I can't easily judge the content of the Krugman's arguments against anti-stimulus arguments. But what makes Krugman stand head and shoulders above the rest of his fellow pundits, is that he makes arguments.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.

Now to be fair, we can criticize the argument in a couple of ways–first, air traffic control involves a task of coordination and it isn't clear that priming the economic pump does in the same way. It isn't just that centralized air traffic control is more efficient than a "free market" equivalent. So we might ask whether the analogy holds.

Second, we might ask whether the claim that "taxpayer are the best judges of how to spend their money" (see last paragraph here) implies that all public spending should be replaced with private spending. A more moderate position might be to argue that when it comes to something like economic stimulus this principle holds true. However, Krugman is arguing against some of the simplistic and fallacious dismissals of stimulus spending, and so aims to free the discussion for substantive arguments from economists and policy makers rather than from the ideological hacks.

By the way, what is the fallacy in the argument he is attacking? Is it a fallacy? Accident, perhaps? Seems to involve the universalization of a principle that probably holds true in many cases (better to let me choose whether to spend my money on a Squeezebox Duet rather than a Sonos System, than have the government choose for me. Maybe something like "When there's no compelling public need, it is preferable to allow citizens to choose how to spend their money than have government choose." What counts as a compelling need is a political question–in the case of the stimulus plan Krugman makes the case that the public need is stimulating the economy and government spending is just much more effective than private spending in doing that.

The "fallacy" seems to work by arguing:

1. We accept principle x.

2. Principle x entails we should not do y.

3. Therefore we should not do y.

However, principle x is either a) not accepted as stated or b) when qualified does not apply to case y.

1. It is wrong to kill.

2. If it is wrong to kill then we should not use lethal force to defend ourselves.

3. Therefore we should not use lethal force to defend ourselves.

 But, either a) it is not wrong (always to kill) or b) it is only wrong to kill without justification.

The fallacy seems to arise when the principle is taken to be persuasive because on the surface it seems true.

General discussion

How slippery is that slope?

7 Comments

Doesn't look like it will be all that slippery.

Polygamy, on the other hand, has a completely different dynamic, she said. "First of all, it's not a one-on-one partnership. Secondly, the dynamics of polygamous relationships in Bountiful certainly involved serious harms around the age of the women getting married, whether or not they are truly consenting to the marriage, the extent to which parental involvement is a coercive part of those marriages, and the patriarchy of how those marriages operate."

And even if a lawyer could prove that a ban on polygamous marriage is a violation of the Charter, the government is entitled to defend the ban on the basis of greater societal good, Prof. Gilbert said.

Don Hutchinson, the legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said there have been several court decisions around same-sex marriage that could be used to defend polygamy. But he is counting on Parliament's current definition of marriage, which prevents multiple spouses, to douse the polygamy debate, he said.

"I am hopeful that where the courts will land is where they landed in the same-sex reference case in 2004," said Mr. Hutchinson, "that they will say, 'You know what, marriage [is] defined by Parliament and we're going to stick with that.' "

Salt Lake City lawyer Rodney Parker, who has represented members of the polygamous religious community in the United States, said yesterday the legalization of gay marriage in Canada will allow the court to focus directly on the defendants' constitutional rights in a way that U.S. courts could not.

With the Supreme Court of Canada decision legalizing gay marriage, Canada is "further down the path" than the U.S. on marriage issues, he said.

"It is a defence we've argued for in the states," Mr. Parker said in a phone interview from his office. The arguments, however, were ineffective because U.S. prosecutors went after sexual crimes, not polygamy. "The cases we had down here so far involved minors. Oler's case does not involve a minor."

Three possibilities are mentioned for distinguishing the polygamous and same-sex marriages.

1. Marriage is reasonably defined as a pairing.

2. The polygamous relationships involve "serious harms" and can be prevented on that basis.

3. Parliament can make a "social good" argument in the case of polygamy.

The last seems interesting in connection with Jerry Brown's Prop 8 brief, in which he argues that the legal question the S.C. must face is whether there is a compelling reason to abrogate the fundamental right to freedom that includes marriage. I.e. one might grant (if one were arguing in California) that polygamy falls under the protection of the right to freedom, and still make it illegal if you have a compelling reason for doing so.