How to Think About Social Issues: Tips 17-18

17. Process: Try to isolate and analyze only the ends most unique to the measure:

For this tip, an example right off the bat would be best to illustrate the point. Consider the system of socialized healthcare that currently exists in Canada. If we wish to analyze the desirability of socialized healthcare, we should try to isolate and analyze only the ends that are the most unique to socialized healthcare and that cannot be achieved with less extreme healthcare interventions. What are these ends? Full government control of the healthcare system and the ability to create a radically more egalitarian system of healthcare provision are fairly unique to the socialized model. If supporters of socialized healthcare present these as the main merits of their system (which they occasionally do), arguing that government can overcome the ‘inefficient anarchy’ of free-market healthcare provision with their more efficient central planning and that no one should be allowed to receive better healthcare than others on account of their ability to pay more for it, there is no problem. Opponents of socialized healthcare have two results, full government control of the healthcare system and their ability to pursue radically egalitarian policies in this industry, that they can then argue are unfavourable rather than favourable. Opponents could make similar arguments as they could have made for the case of socialization of the grocery industry as was presented in tip #15, arguing that government control of business is incredibly inefficient and that egalitarianism is either not a valid moral ideal or is not worth the productivity loss as a result of the killing of incentives to produce that its pursuit entails.

Unfortunately, the debate over socialized healthcare is not usually constrained to these points. All too often, supporters of socialized healthcare will confront opponents as follows: 'Government must provide healthcare to all to prevent people from dying in the streets if they can’t afford to pay the medical fees. You heartless libertarians don’t care for the plight of the poor, and their blood would be on your hands'. Of course, there are many good responses for the libertarian to this contention that in a free-market system, poor people will be dropping dead in the streets due to lack of proper healthcare. The likelihood that private charity, once it is no longer being crowded-out by taxation and welfare services, could help these people is actually quite large. Once government stops meddling with the healthcare industry and stops backing up the doctors’ restrictive associations, free-market forces are sure to significantly reduce the cost of healthcare from its current artificially high level. This will allow more people to access more healthcare services.

The main point is the following though: this argument, while interesting in its own right, has little to do with an argument over the desirability of socialized healthcare! While the principle of social safety net-ism, the principle that the government has the duty to provide a minimal standard of living to sustain those who cannot make enough money in the market economy, is a part of the idea of socialized healthcare, it could easily be pursued by less radical means than the full socialization of the healthcare industry. It is full government control of the healthcare industry and radical healthcare egalitarianism that are the ends fairly unique to socialized healthcare, a discussion of the merits or demerits of social safety net-ism has little to no place in a debate over socialized healthcare.

For instance, imagine that the government did not intervene in the healthcare industry, directly, at all. Rather, it just provided a general social safety net service for citizens who could not sustain themselves in the market economy, which would presumably include the provision of the healthcare services needed to sustain the life of their wards, provided that the cost was not truly prohibitive, such as for fancy, experimental treatments. The healthcare system would in no way be socialized, yet there would also be provisions to ensure that citizens would not drop dead in the streets due to lack of money to pay for healthcare. Thus, it would appear that the debate about social safety net-ism does not belong in the debate over the socialization of the healthcare industry, because less radical means could be adopted that would produce similar results in this area.

Another example of this would be a debate on how large the military budget should be. War hawks like to respond to any proposal to reduce the military budget by stating that such a cut would fatally undermine the security of the country, after all, surely these people don’t believe that the military is a useless institution! But when we analyze a military budget, we see that while each dollar can indeed buy more military capacity, each dollar is, in most countries, certainly not absolutely necessary to the security of its citizens. Perhaps the proponents of military budget cuts don’t particularly care if, for instance, the United States stopped operating military bases in the Philippines or if they reduced their fleet of air craft carriers from 100 to 50. Goods are evaluated based on the serviceability of their marginal units (the least valued unit of a stock of goods or a potential new unit to be added to a stock with its ability to satisfy a necessarily less valued desire than the desires satisfied by the current goods in a stock). It is the valuations of these units that play a role in human choice and human action, not valuations of entire classes of things such as ‘all the silk in the world’ versus “all the water in the world”. Thus, the question is not: which is better, having a military or not having a military? The question is: how much are we willing to give up for each unit of military service and what functions should the military be employed for? In this case, only the ends that an incredibly well-funded military could be used to achieve which an adequately funded military used mainly for the purposes of actual, physical defense of the country itself could not achieve should be the ones being debated, not the desirability of having a military taken as a whole.                              

18. Do not try to settle arguments by appealing to authority:

An easy, and highly unsatisfactory, way of avoiding the necessity of defending your point of view in an argument is to proclaim something like: 'Well, all respectable economists agree with me that the progressive income tax is a necessary and advantageous policy, your opposition to it is therefore quite silly'. This settles nothing though. For one, the other debater could just respond: 'Actually, all respectable economists believe that the progressive income tax is a foolish and destructive policy'. But this leads nowhere and the debate is not at all advanced in this manner. The question is: whose ‘authorities’ are right? The only way of answering this question is to restate the arguments that these authorities have made and then use these arguments to make your point. Really, then, the authorities don’t prove anything. Citing them may be useful in order to employ their arguments that have perhaps been more thoughtfully formulated than ones that you could come up with on the spot, but at the end of the day, it is the arguments, not the authorities, that are pitted against one another.