The issue of gun control seems particularly prone to fuzzy thinking and ill-fitting analogies. Although I generally believe that the solution to gun violence is ethical, not regulatory, and that every freedom we trade for security is a step toward tyranny, I will concede there may be valid arguments for reasonable gun control. I rarely hear them, however.
Oh the delicious irony of modern politics. In 2001, after deciding that it’s previous attempt to comply with an EPA dictate for cleaning the air by oxygenating gasoline had resulted mainly in dirtier water, the state of California banned the oxygenating compound MBTE and requested a waiver from the EPA regulation to avoid a mandated switch to ethanol. The state’s argument that there were other ways to achieve the objective may or may not have merit – it’s not clear how much of the dispute over that is science and how much is politics. But when, in the past, has that argument even mattered to Democrats – and the California government is pretty much entirely composed of Democrats – when an environmental regulation was at stake?
In a world of boundless resources, where no worthwhile project went undone for lack of funding or attention, we could eliminate arsenic and a host of other environmental poisons to arbitrarily small tolerances with impunity. In the world outside of utopian fiction, however, limited resources must be allocated, and what is used for one thing is unavailable for another….It may be that as a society we conclude that reducing arsenic levels is the best use for those resources, but that conclusion is neither obvious nor unanimous and has nothing to do with science.
I tend to be cynical about government so government ineptitude rarely shocks me. The electricity crisis in California provided an exception. It wasn’t just the up front stupidity that amazed but the refusal to acknowledge it even after the fact. It was bad enough that the original “deregulation” program included such regulatory aspects as freezing retail prices, forcing distributors to pay the highest bid price on the wholesale market, and mandating utility divestiture of power plants; the legislature later added a prohibition on entering into long-term contracts, thus guaranteeing all purchases had to be made in the spot market. What is amazing is not that there was a crisis, but that it took so long to happen.
Mr. Cohen drew an analogy between ‘youthful’ drunken-driving episodes involving our current president Bush and recent school shootings. His argument –- that we could and should curb shootings by restricting access to guns –- has both merits and pitfalls, but his analogy was wholly inapt.
I have observed over the last few decades a woeful decline in the quality of analogies presented in public debate – and, I would argue, a general decline in the ability of even educated people either to formulate or to evaluate analogies in any context – and it has become one of my pet peeves.
This comes back to the fundamental questions that are rarely addressed in any straightforward way: Who should we accept as immigrants? Who should we reject? What commitments, to civil behavior and to our national best interest, ought we require of those we accept? And what commitments, to civil behavior, to our national best interest, and to duty to our society and respect for our culture, ought we demand of those who would claim citizenship in our nation?
Every day print and television news organizations bombard us with the results of studies purporting to prove something profound about the effects of public policy, most contradicting some other studies reported last week. The election we just endured brought us a blizzard of conflicting statistics and analyses presented by the candidates and repeated by the media. Almost every advocacy organization now solicits and publishes studies showing – surprise surprise – that their particular policy agenda would be the best thing ever if only we would allow them to implement it. How are we to sort out the good from the bad in this barrage if your reporters will not present us with enough of the underlying information to make an informed evaluation?
The issue of abortion is once again forming the backdrop for the political show of our election cycle. And, as for the last thirty years, it is the bogeyman in the shadows, obsession of the few, ignored by the many until it is needed by politicians to frighten voters when they seem to be happy with the opposition. Abortion is universally recognized as divisive and intractable, a subject to be used for advantage among partisans but avoided in polite company, a fuse you can light but cannot control.
The case of Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy whose mother drowned trying to get herself and her son to America, illustrated both the sanctimoniousness of the American Left in dismissing concerns about political and economic freedom under socialist governments, and the ineptitude of the American Right in articulating them.
The partisan wrangling over whether or not to allow the census bureau to supplement the traditional head-count method (’actual enumeration’) with statistically-derived estimates for the expected under-count in the 2000 census was enlightening only in the way it illustrated our leaders’ ability to miss the point.