“No true Scotsman”

Last edited Thu May 31, 2012, 04:54 PM - Edit history (1)

For quite some time I have been puzzling over the quixotic march to the right of the modern republican party. Conventional wisdom (read also: whatever the mainstream media says) would have us believe that this is a part of a larger movement of both parties to the outlying extremes of their own ideologies. Of course a hardened left-winger like me would laugh at this but anyone that relies on Fox News would wind up believing that President Obama is somehow to the left of all the European style socialists, Mao, Stalin, and Karl Marx.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have been toying with and applying right leaning economic policies for some 30 years now. Whether you know it or not we have been reducing taxes on the wealthy for something like 60 years and we have been deregulating businesses since sometime in the 1980’s. This ideology of free market solutions has been so pervasive that President Clinton embraced deregulation to some degree and President Obama attempted to continue attempting to tax-cut us to prosperity. Obviously the republicans they worked with had some influence as to fiscal policy though merely blaming the republicans for this might be a bit too simplistic. But fair is fair and the Republican Party has been far more active with this movement and has pushed it to the very limits whenever possible. The recent Republican Party platform in the state of Iowa would probably be fairly prominent in their economic and social intent and exemplifies what would have been mostly considered the extreme right wing back in Ronald Reagan’s day.

I digress. These plans have not met with the kind of Randian Galt’s Gulch style success that the right wing has long promised. As a matter of fact the act of creating policy that gives more money to the wealthiest Americans predictably concentrates that wealth and does not, as some suggested, result in a wonderful flood of trickling cash, prizes, and opportunity for all. As smarter people than I have pointed out, the only force that motivates hiring people in the private market is not increased money or profit, but increased demand for product. If a company can manage to make more money without adding a single new job via a tax break then why would it?

Of course the economic downturn that has been occurring, with some bumps and rises here and there has caused some kind of crisis of faith for some. The easy response has been merely to blame democrats or make some hokey claim that the “job creators” are being punished somehow with burdensome regulations and taxes. But that is just spin. The underlying rationale for fiscal conservatives is that we have not deregulated or relieved the burden of taxation quite enough. That somehow, there is this magic Laffer curve sweet spot that we have to attain. To these folk the housing bubble bursting and global markets crashing is all being caused somehow by overregulation despite all available evidence contradicting this.

“Not true Scotsman” is a logical fallacy whereby one assumes that whenever your opponent in debate brings up an example or person that does not apply to the generalization you have created then the response would be to deny that person as being a part of that category.
All Scotsmen love Haggis
John in is a Scotsmen
John does not like Haggis
John is not a Scotsman as all True Scotsmen love haggis.

When confronted with Republicans of their supposed alignment who dispute economic chaos or who confront those policies the extremists will scream that these republicans and policies aren’t true conservatism. Likewise when confronted with the facts that their economic policies have resulted in continued failure they will shout that the reason it failed is because it is not true conservative policy and that we must move further to the right.

This seems to be the metaphor-fallacy is the only sense I could make of it.