This describes 5 fallacies that Big-Government (BG) and Big-Business (BB) use in order to get people to spend money on one wasteful scheme or another. These days BG and BB are so intertwined that their schemes are usually one and the same: witness the love-fest between Obama and the GE CEO or the trillion dollar bailout of Golman Sachs, JP Morgan and General Motors.
Accounting Fraud - Count only the benefits.
One example of this is when the government squanders a huge amount of money on some wasteful jobs program. They take a few hundred billion dollars from taxpayers and make a big show about how many jobs are “created”, but they don’t count the jobs that are destroyed because private people didn’t have the money to buy big-screen TV’s or cars or vacations.
The whole ethanol boondoggle is another example where it sounds great to create fuel from renewable things like corn. Of course no one wants to talk about the fact that it takes 1.2 gallons of fuel to make enough corn to create 1 gallon of this politically-popular renewable fuel.
Expert Opinion - Hire only experts who agree with you.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. So the supporters of one scheme or another can always find experts who will (for a fee) produce reams of paper “proving” that this scheme will be wonderful and solve all problems.
Experts can even be created and opposition stifled by applying copious amounts of money. University professors are constantly competing to see who can bring in the most research money. It didn’t take them long to realize that professors who made studies “proving” global warming got plenty of funding from Uncle Sam, while those disputing warming grew poorer. Does anyone remember the global cooling hysteria of the early 70’s? Look it up.
Government Data - Lying with statistics.
This type of fallacy is really too big to cover here. In fact it’s the subject of many books such as “How to Lie With Statistics” by Darrell Huff . One example is how government changes the definitions of unemployment, inflation or the money supply to suit their own purposes.
Predicting the future - huge future gains/losses.
If you have a small chance of a huge gain then you would happily pay some price for that chance. Or if you had a small chance of a catastrophic loss you would make an effort to avoid it. So all that is necessary is to promise bigger and bigger future gains (losses) if a certain action is taken (or not taken).
So with global warming every year we have bigger and bigger claims about the horrible destruction that will be wrought. If it’s far enough in the future then the perpetrators of this fallacy are safe from ridicule. Religions used to promise converts extreme bliss or 100 virgins in the afterlife, if only they would cross our palms with silver today. Heh heh.
False Advertising - Bait and switch.
Under this category we have things like child pornography laws that they told us would catch really horrendous and depraved people, but then the laws end up being applied to 17 year old highschool girls who use their cell phones to send pictures of their boobs to boyfriends. Or the AMT was sold as a way to keep those evil rich people from getting away without paying taxes, except now it’s applied to families with 2 incomes who are very far from rich and struggling to make a house payment.
No comments:
Post a Comment