Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 8:37:27 PM
I wrote before about the false dichotomy, writing about it in "
Gardasil and Logical Errors" and "
A Nonsensical Debate". However, in both of those cases I was talking, for the most part about strictly logical errors. Today, while responding to some comments it struck me that many liberal arguments are based entirely upon the false dichotomy, or excluded middle.
The best example may be the comment made by Caday5, arguing that we need to decide what to do with the "have nots", will we help them or just say they have to sink or swim on their own. As the "help" here is implicitly help orchestrated coercively through the state, the choice presented is either a welfare state or nothing. It is the same argument that the left often makes when conservatives oppose welfare measures, arguing that if we oppose welfare we want to see people starving in the street.
The problem here is that this ignores the whole point of conservatism and does so by ignoring a whole host of solutions outside their false dichotomy.
Government aid and
nothing do not exhaust all possibilities of aiding the "have nots". For instance, how about private charity? As I often respond, no one is stopping the leftists from helping the poor, we only oppose coercively forcing everyone to fund government welfare. There is nothing int he conservative agenda that would prevent private charity.
In fact, that whole portion of the conservative agenda is conveniently omitted by the left. When we oppose welfare we do so because we think the state is the wrong tool for giving aid, that private charity is both more just and more effective, yet the left portrays it as us wanting the poor to starve. When we argue that social pressures are the right way to stop private racism, not government discrimination in favor of minorities, they pretend that we are arguing in favor of racism. When we argue that education is more efficient when privately funded and managed, they pretend we want only the children of the rich to read. In short, they posit the absurd false dichotomy of "the state or nothing", as if the state is the only means of accomplishing anything.
But the fact remains, whatever the state does it does with money taken from the private sector, labor bought or forced from the private sector, and other resources it took from private individuals. Considering the inefficiencies and overhead involved in any state measure, whatever the state does could easily be done privately more efficiently. So if the state can do it, so can the private sector. To argue that it is the state or nothing, they must then believe that everyone else, except their enlightened minority, are heartless devils who must be forced to give at the point of a government gun. Otherwise, how can they believe the state can do something private individuals cannot?