21. Don’t just assume the existence of special interpersonal
bonds between individuals:
This fallacy is prevalent, for
example, in the ideology of nationalism. A nationalist is someone who proclaims
that those belonging to a particular political entity or ethno-religious group
share a deep bond. Because of this bond, they must put the interests of their
countrymen, nation, or ethno-religious brothers ahead of those of the rest of
humanity. The question is: why must they? And do they even necessarily have
this bond with their compatriots in the first place?
For example, take a Canadian citizen
that lives in Toronto. It is entirely possible that this person could
sympathize with and have more in common with someone living in Hong Kong (a
fellow cosmopolitan city-dweller that may speak English) than with someone
living in rural Newfoundland, a part of the ‘Canadian nation’. The nationalist
argument, however, blithely assumes that this cannot possibly be the case.
Hence, we hear of the responsibilities that Canadians have for one another, how
the success of ‘our’ industries is more important than worldwide prosperity,
etc… The fact is though, the creation of these special interpersonal bonds of
sympathy between individuals can only be done by the individual himself, not
some outside observer telling him who he ‘really’ sympathizes with.
Racists, Marxists, and religious
extremists commit a similar fallacy when they assert that all members of a race
‘really’ sympathize more with members of ‘their’ race than with members of
‘other races’, that all ‘social classes’ are bound together in solidarity by
their ‘class interests’, or that members of a religion must do all they can do
advance the interests of their co-religionists, even at the expense of people
who subscribe to other religions. It is more likely that (though I do not want
to commit the fallacy and make any absolutist statements on the subject) most
individuals have a strong interpersonal bond with their family, a slightly less
strong bond with their good friends, an even weaker bond with their
acquaintances, and perhaps a bit of a bond with members of their locality that
they may not know personally. Besides this, it is probably in the general interests of
members of humanity as a whole that the world society operates in such a way as
to optimize, as much as possible, every individual’s ability to pursue their
own subjectively determined ends and desires. Though something resembling a
racial, national, ethnic, or religious solidarity may exist for some people, it
is by no means certain that this is the case for everyone. This being the case,
beware of arguments that assume some kind of solidarity that may or may not
exist as their starting point.
22. Beware the tyranny of moderation:
“Everything in moderation” is a
saying that is often expressed. I will endeavour to show when this phrase is
applicable, and when it leads to absurdity.
A common
area where moderation is called for is eating habits. For example, take an ice
cream lover that is also concerned about his health. On one hand, there is the
extreme of eating no ice cream at all, thus improving his health, but not being
able to delight in the taste of his beloved ice cream either. On the other
hand, there is the extreme of eating a lot of ice cream, which would be
delicious at the time, but would lead to health and weight problems. In this
scenario, moderation would seem to be a good recommendation. This is because
there is a balance to be struck between two desired, but mutually incompatible,
goals: better health and eating delicious ice cream. Also, for most people, the
enjoyment of ice cream tends to be the strongest in the first few bites, and
gradually diminishes as more and more is eaten. Likewise, the negative health
effects of eating a bit of ice cream are not very serious at all, but get
exponentially more and more serious as more and more ice cream is eaten
(diabetes, obesity, etc…). Thus, a compromise of eating a small, or moderate,
amount of ice cream would seem to be in order for most people in this scenario.
Take another
example from the field of ingestible substances, and the call for moderation
becomes absurd. The ingestible substance in question is cyanide, a poison that
instantly kills the person who ingests it with only a small amount ingested.
Let us consider the two ‘extremes’. One ‘extreme’ is not to eat any cyanide,
and thus not die. The other ‘extreme’ is to eat as much cyanide as you can
before dying. Unless you are suicidal, in this case the call for “everything in
moderation” is absurd. A moderate amount of cyanide will still kill you, and
even if you ingested such a small amount that it didn’t kill you, there would
probably still be serious health repercussions and no positive benefits. In this
case, the ‘extreme’ of not eating any cyanide is the best option.
Now, the
cyanide example may seem silly, but, as we will soon see, it is often in this
sense that “everything in moderation” is applied to political questions. Take a
dispute between those who would like garbage collection to be privately run by
profit seeking business who makes individual garbage collection contracts with
home owners, and those who would like garbage collection to be ‘socialized’ and
run by the municipality, giving everyone a uniform amount of garbage collection
done by government garbage employees and paying for it with tax money. Seeing
this dispute, the political ‘moderationist’ comes in. He comes up with a
compromise: garbage collection will be done by private companies, but the
government, not individual home owners, will contract with them and pay them
with taxpayer money. Since “everything in moderation” is good for ice cream
eating, it must be good for this issue too right? Not necessarily. For
supporters of the free-market, this case is closer to the cyanide example than
to the ice cream example. For in this case, one ‘extreme’ is desirable, while
another ‘extreme’ is undesirable. Between ‘garbage socialism’, something that
has serious theoretical problems and has a poor empirical track record, and
‘free-enterprise garbage’, something that works better theoretically and has a
good empirical track record, no compromise is necessary. Except for people with a very strong, fervent belief in the desirability of material egalitarianism in all fields,
‘free-enterprise garbage’ would seem to be the desirable solution from the perspective of those
who appreciate the utilitarian benefits of the free-market.
Take a
real-life situation where the moderation principle has been applied in
political affairs, producing disastrous results: the US healthcare system. Once
upon a time, in the 19th century, the US had a relatively free
market in healthcare. Everyone was free to offer medical services to anyone
else for an agreed upon price. Then, the first ‘moderate’ intervention came:
licensing requirements for doctors. Now, doctors had to be a members of the
American Medical Association in order to legally practice medicine, in effect,
a doctor’s guild was created. Now, this guild did what every other guild does,
it restricted entry into its field (in the name of consumer safety and high
standards of course!) in order to jack up the price of the licensed doctors’
services. This made healthcare more expensive for the average medical consumer.
After this, more ‘moderate’ interventions followed: employers were ‘encouraged’
through tax incentives and to evade wartime price controls, or forced through
regulations or labour union pressure, to give their employees health insurance.
Health insurers were eventually required by law to cover more and more
uninsurable medical expenses (such as routine, discretionary visits to the
doctor and expensive medical screening procedures) and were required to lump
more and more medically risky people into the same insurance category as healthier
people. These measures served to jack the price of healthcare even higher.
Medicare and Medicaid came in the 1960s, the government was to help the elderly
and the poor cover these higher and higher healthcare costs, levying large taxes to pay
for it. Most recently, President Obama decided that he would force everyone to buy
health insurance and force many employers to provide it for their employees, something
that, if implemented, will result in higher unemployment due to the high cost
of providing health insurance, at bloated medical prices, for employees.
But, are not all these interventions
‘moderate’? The US healthcare system is not a completely government-run system
as in Canada or the UK, nor is it a completely free-enterprise system. Should not this bring the best of both worlds? No, because these ‘moderate’
interventions served to break the market mechanisms for conserving medical
resources of requiring upfront payments and having open competition in the field of
medical provision, the combination of which would have prevented medical costs
from sky-rocketing as they did.
This same
logic applies to most government interventions in the free-market order: while
allegedly infusing a degree of some perceived virtue of socialism such as
egalitarianism, their most prominent characteristic is just to break the
mechanisms that had allowed the free-market system to function in that area.
The deteriorating situation then calls either for a repeal of the interventions
or to march to the intervention’s logical conclusion: socialism. One again, we
are faced with a consideration of the two ‘extremes’: free-market or socialism.
Calls for moderation only make sense when, like in the ice cream example, the
two extremes result in the sole pursuit of two desires which are to some extent
mutually incompatible. In this case, the best course of action could be a
compromise where both desires are pursued to a lesser extent. Some political
interventions could qualify under this rubric if overall prosperity and
egalitarianism, two mutually incompatible goals, are desired. But, the proposed
intervention would still have to be scrutinized carefully in order to ascertain
that the amount of prosperity given up is worth the amount of egalitarianism gained,
and this not just in the short-run, but also in the long-run and keeping in
mind general principles. If, like me, you find little desirable about
socialism or egalitarianism, then not very many compromises are necessary.
The
preceding discussion should allow you to see the fallacy in something like the
following statement: “The Austrian School of economics is too extreme. It
constantly praises the free-market mechanism of resource allocation and
constantly finds fault with government economic interventions. As such, it
resembles a religion, rather than a science.” As we have seen, saying that
something is ‘extreme’ does not necessarily make it incorrect or a religion. If
someone thinks and can persuade others that the science of economics
demonstrates that measure A leads to ends B and C, while measure B leads to
ends D and E, and this person values ends B and C higher than he values ends D
and E, then it does not matter how many times these judgements favour the
free-market, while shunning government economic intervention. To simply
proclaim that someone’s scientific and value judgements cannot be correct
because taken together, they constitute an ‘extreme’ position on the
free-market versus government economic control spectrum, is to abdicate all
responsibility for actually analyzing these scientific and value judgements
yourself. In fact, who is more ‘extreme’? Is it the person who makes a separate
scientific and value judgement on each issue as they come up, or the person who
dismisses the need for such judgements by proclaiming that the ‘moderate’
position must be right? The latter would seem to be the attitude closer to
religious dogma, and the former closer to the attitudes of science.
Ultimately,
there is no need for moderation between what you consider true and what you
consider false, or between your own subjective happiness and misery. One should
be pursued, the other discarded, and don’t let the invocation of ‘moderation’
convince you otherwise!
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