Mother Jones-Is it Obnoxious to Support Health Care For the Poor?

By Kevin Drum
Tue Jun. 24, 2014 10:35 AM EDT

Here is Gary Silverman in the Financial Times:

What I like about Obamacare is that it shows some respect for “those people” — as Hudson called them in Giant — who are good enough to work the fields and mow the lawns, and build the roads and sew the clothes, and diaper the babies and wash the dishes, but somehow aren’t good enough to see a doctor from time to time to make sure there is nothing wrong inside.

Along with a passage from another author about Palestinians, this makes Tyler Cowen unaccountably angry:

I am not in this post seeking to adjudicate ACA or U.S. policy in the Middle East. The easy target is to go after these two authors, but I am interested in different game. The deeper point is that virtually all of us argue this way, albeit with more subtlety. A lot of the more innocuous-sounding arguments we use all the time come perilously close to committing the same fallacies as do these quite transparent and I would say quite obnoxious mistaken excerpts. One of the best paths for becoming a good reader of economics and politics blog posts (and other material) is to learn when you are encountering these kinds of arguments in disguised form.