Refuting Rapid-Fire Demagoguary
I cannot for the life of me remember where I found this quote, but I’m guessing it was Hazlitt or Hayek or someone of the sort: “The problem with socialism is that their fallacies can be stated in a single sentence, but they take a lifetime to refute.”
This column by Steven Pearlstein is an excellent example of this phenomenon, in rapid-fire form. He spews out a dozen assertions, each of which you could write an entire novel refuting.
Here’s my response, which I emailed him:
Your column, “The Magical World of Voodoo ‘Economists’” completely lacks substance. You make numerous claims that various programs are good and equate to progress, but nowhere in your column do you even attempt to explain why.
Reading your column paints me a picture of a person who believes anything done by the government counts as progress. I take it you support Guantanamo and torture? Internment camps for the Japanese Americans in WW2? Maybe you support the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The wars being fought in Afghanistan, Libya, and so on? Supporter of Citizens-United perhaps? If any of these developments are bad ones, what exactly makes the ones you refer to not? Surely you believe some of the 20th (or 21st) century really SHOULD be repealed; that we made some mistakes. That’s all these candidates believe, you just happen not to agree with what they believe didn’t or doesn’t work.
Without explaining any of why you believe those things are all good and proper, you do your reader no favors. You are simply a propaganda mouthpiece. I implore you to fight your battles in the realm of ideas and critical thought, not to stoop to demagoguery and sound bites.
I’ll just leave you with a few points, and I’ll try to be brief.
Social Security: The trust fund is a farce. Members of the Social Security Board of Trustees have admitted it. They also will admit that Social Security does, as Perry claimed, function exactly the same way as a Ponzi scheme. The difference they will say, is a matter of intent. But that’s only partially true. The bigger difference is in a Ponzi scheme, once you know what it is you have the option to get out. Look at the arguments they were making about the Social Security tax and the trust fund when its constitutionality was first called into question, and compare them to now. You will find a complete 180 in their positions if you do the research. If present day claims had been made then, it would have been struck down as unconstitutional.
Great Depression: Contrary to popular belief, Hoover was not a small government guy. Did you know FDR actually ran against Hoover on a platform of less intervention and government? Hoover didn’t leave things alone by any measure imaginable. He did exactly what FDR did. Want to know a secret? There was a severe recession in 1920. Want to know why you’ve never heard of it? Because Harding did almost nothing, and the economy recovered in six months.
Federal Reserve: It hasn’t actually done so great a job of providing us stability. Have you had your head in the ground the past four years? Hard to refute your defense of it since you don’t bother to provide one, but a real and honest discussion about how effective the Federal Reserve has actually been seems perfectly reasonable and healthy to me.
16th amendment: We got along just fine without income taxes for hundreds of years. Personally I think both the people and the economy would be better off getting to keep what they earn. Seems to me that the burden of proof for the necessity of taking people’s hard earned money from them should lay with those doing the taking.
17th amendment: There was a good reason for not having senators popularly elected. Democracy is not a perfect system, not even a great system. It leads to a tyranny of the majority. Which is why the founders set the US up as a Republic; they recognized this simple fact. Having senators accountable to the states rather than the people allowed the states to have a voice in the process. The people are already represented through the House, that was its purpose.
I could go on, or into more detail on a given point, but I hope you at least get the idea. Portraying them as kooks to further your own agenda is just disappointing. I hope you’ll make a shift in integrity and try some honest intellectual debate in the future.
Posted by wobbles on Sunday, September 11, 2011