One of the most persistent pitfalls in political argumentation is a version of the fallacy of false equivalence. A friend dubs it the fallacy of ripe apples and rotten oranges. In a political context, it's when an advocate compares an idealized or best-case version of his preferred position with a realistic—or perhaps even exaggeratedly negative—version of his opponent’s. We see this often in debates over grand economic models. Capitalists accuse socialists of overlooking the actual record of socialist regimes and judging capitalism’s inadequacies not against a probable alternative but a utopian image. Socialists are charged with setting up a target that is always moving; if objectors point to the defects of, e.g., Maduro’s Venezuela, the reply that “that’s not true socialism” is sure to come. Likewise, libertarians often find themselves criticized by everyone from centrists to Communists for holding up an idealized, unfalsifiable characterization of the benignity of exchange and the free market and then criticizing the regulations and redistribution that characterize the modern state for falling short of this condition. Every social ill, their critics charge, is thereby allowed to be traced back to our not having a really free market, while the real-life deficiencies of markets go unexamined.
Read Full Article »
