Argue against your own position!

Post Reply New Topic

Okay, let's give this a go.

Just a few caveats; I had a really hard time working around my knowledge in this subject to craft an argument that I didn't believe to be fatally flawed, so I had to decide to argue for gun control rather than gun prohibition and do so in a way that did not rely on traditional rationales like crime or accidents.

Guns are a labor saving device for employing force, and as use of force is something that should be discouraged whenever possible, the distribution of firearms should be limited to as few entities as feasible. This would mean largely disarming both the police and the general populace as part of a comprehensive plan to increase overall societal stability, which would also include drug policy reform and improvements to the social safety net, both proven crime reducing measures. Tax revenue currently directed to drug interdiction and firearms law enforcement could be put to better use fighting poverty and attacking the root causes of crime. Police weapons would be kept in secured armories for use only when absolutely necessary, while civilians would be limited to certain long guns generally unsuited to criminal use. De-militarizing the police would reduce the adversarial stance of law enforcement and improve community relations, allowing the police to do more with less and prevent violent crime rather than punish the perpetrators after the damage has been done. A further benefit to this plan would be increased international respect and a greater ability to participate in UN arms control treaties, showing a renewed US commitment to international relations.

OK, pretty weak I know, but I think I should get credit for not only arguing for gun control, but throwing that whole UN thing in too.

I assume you do not convince yourself but you presentation is intriguing to me.

Last edited by Sand on 04 Jan 2011, 7:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suppose if I could convince myself than it wouldn't really be arguing against my own position anymore; getting out anything that I didn't think intellectually dishonest was challenge enough. I didn't flesh it out, but I ended up borrowing my central thesis from an internal argument I have for justifying my distaste for private prisons when I'm generally in favor of privatization. It comes down to my feeling that incarceration should be inefficient and expensive in order to discourage it's use down to a last resort, it's the one area of the government that I don't want streamlined. I don't really believe that the same principle really applies to firearms, but I've spent so much time debating gun control that I wanted an original rationale that I hadn't personally debunked before.

My problem is that I am a centrist. What's the opposite position from sitting on the fence?

However, I will volunteer to take up a couple of arguments:

1) I will argue against a single-payer model for medically necessary health services (oh, please, let Inuyasha take up the other side!)

2) I will argue against the recognition of same-sex marriage

or

3) I will argue in favour of religious tradition as a basis for public law

I am open to any who support these positions to take up the other side.

It is actually quite easy to argue my side of the issue, though are you going for a government monopoly on health care, or the Individual mandate in Obamacare, if the individual mandate, just look at the United States Constitution and consider the ramifications of how much power does government gain if they can penalize people for not participating in commerce. If you're referring to government controlling health care you have several examples as to why it doesn't work and even some actual horror stories you can go off of.

From my standpoint, arguing for the individual mandate and/or the single payer model would be tough. Primarily because I know how the further rammifications and in the case of the individual mandate, being unconstitutional.

I can try to argue against my viewpoints on this issue, but it is actually rather hard to do on the spur of the moment, especially since I can see ways to completely destroy the arguments to support single payer or individual mandate on the spot.


Argument for single payer (afraid I have to go with left-wing talking points):
It will cut down on the complexity of all those insurance forms and billing that medical providers have to fill out. It will save on cost because people will no longer be gouged by evil drug companies, doctors performing unnecessary procedures, etc. It will do away with greedy insurance companies that are out to extort the American people.

That pretty much sums up the argument as far as I can make impromptu.

Then why not prepare? A few people have done so for this.

Meh, the problem is that all the arguments I have heard for single payer or individual mandate, I could pretty much torpedo in under 5 minutes. Even the arguments I used impromptu, I know sources that can refute, disprove, etc. So this is something I really have to think about.

First of all, let's dispose of the constitutional issue. Single payer systems can be effected by individual states if there is an objection to the federal government doing so. (And the US constitution is irrelevant to 95% of the world's population). The constitutional argument is a canard to divert us from the real question, which should be something akin to, "Which system of ensuring individual's access to health care provides the maximal cost-benefit?" (Though I am open to restructuring the question.)



It's supposed to be tough. That's the point.

(Incidentally, drop the empty bluff. It makes you look ridiculous.)



Oh, you're not even trying! Where is that much vaunted intellect? Putting in a piss-poor effort for the other side doesn't make your preferred argument stronger--it just shows you to be weaker.

Now then. My arguments against single-payer insurance schemes:

1) It is well documented that universal, or near universal insurance schemes drive up costs of care due to moral hazard. Cost increases are due to two principal drivers: price and volume. While the monopsodic nature of single payer systems can mitigate the price component by exercising control of price, they have little ability to control volume. When every problem, no matter how trivial, can be the subject of an office or ER visit, the capacity of the service delivery system can get overtaxed.

2) Insurance systems inhibit innovation and competition. Insurance systems--whether competitive or single payer, will attempt to mitigate volume by limiting the nature of services insured. When the insurer gets to decide what is "medically necessary," and what therapies (whether medical, surgical or pharmacalogical) are approved for a given condition, there is a disincentive for patients to seek out other courses of treatment, and for physicians, nurses and pharmacists to provide them. Furthermore, price point pressures serve to ensure that practictioners lack the financial independence to tailor service to price.

3) In a similar vein, a monopsodic marketplace will favour generic pharmaceuticals over patent originals once patent protection expires. This requires pharmaceutical companies to entirely recoup their costs of research, development and approval within the lifespan of their intellectual property rights.

4) Monopsodic marketplaces create unequal bargaining power. Within the public sector this can be mitigated by the electoral pressure that consumers can exercise over policy makers. Within the private sector, however, consumers have no such power.

Centrifute? topic

You could be on edge, as I often am. I did not think of centrism as being "fence sitting". To me. fence sitting=being a wimp, which is not indicative of what you post. Your views are liberal and inclusive, which is what I share, though I am a little more conservative in some areas regarding openness and privacy. If I was lesbian, for example, I would not care about the marriage, only about having my same sex partner as my beneficiary, or else make a will to have her as an heir. My private business is my private business, and the government has no business interfering in it. (This is not contrary to what I really think.)

Let the record show that I was correct in my prediction. Inuyasha is so trapped in his ideological bubble that he is utterly incapable of understanding, much less engaging, other viewpoints.

Visagrunt, well-done on making a good-faith effort to actually argue the other side of an issue. Dox, pretty good on the gun control side.

While I don't have an irrefutable argument against the social safety net, I do have a fairly strong one.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bizzaro World Master_Pedant:

Many social safety net programs were developed out Bismarckian, 19th century model based on antiquated social and economic theories and model. Over the 20th century, advances in economic thinking have demonstrated the errors in such programs. Fatal flaws include administration, which can be cumbersome, and misplaced incentives.

Most social safety programs involve enormous bureaucracies, be they welfare payments or even training programs. There's enormous information on those who participate and, as we all know, it's impossible to keep such large databases perfectly private, so there is the issue of sensitive personal information getting into the wrong hands. Other problems include responding to flaws the administration of the program or changes in the demographic population being served. Technocrats are notoriously slow at such responses and even attempts to reform organizations like the police and National Health Services through performance targets by New Labour in the UK have proved disasterous (i.e. the NHS reduced wait times by doing easier operations first and making more essential operations last & reduced the number of patients waiting on trollies by removing their wheels & reclassifying them as beds, the police similarly reclassified crimes - according to Adam Curtius, in "The Trap").

Another flaw is the incentive structure. Many programs have a poverty-level threshold as criteria for service and, because if these programs didn't than it would be difficult to fund them. However, this disincentivizes people from making more than the maximimum threshold of the given program, because if they do they lose benefits. So people won't surpass the tough transisitonary phase between welfare poor and and lower middle class, because some members of the working poor will receive less than some members of the welfare poor.

Because of this incentive structure and administration problem, which there seems little chance of alleviating, it is most prudent to reduce, with an eye to abolishing, these welfare state programs. If one desires to replace them with something, a negative income tax would be better.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Before Orwell (the bearded Irish-Ohioan) launches Orwellian inquistion against me for using a documentary (most of which he regards as "poor cheese"), let me say that I'm too tired to find the primary sources and if I forced myself to do so, I'd probably proscrastinate even longer on this assignment.

I'm not satisfied until you cannot refute your own argument.

Most arguments in practical politics are over values, one can always question the values of another. Incidentally, I have yet to go about "refuting" the argument I issued in my head, so perhaps it is irrefutable by me. But I doubt that it is absolutely irrefutable (i.e. refuting it would violate the law of non-contradiction).

Incidentally, I consider the scope of the demand (i.e. provide an irrefutable argument against the entire social safety net) somewhat too large to go about. I'd probably have to tailour a hundred different arguments detailing the specifics of various current programs and their alternatives before I could categorically "refute" the social safety net.

I nominate Xenon13 to argue for the validity of the economic notion of the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment.

Not bad. You could elaborate on its Bismarckian roots and thus its ties to proto-totalitarian regimes (you already brought in Bismarck, so why not have a field day with it? In fact, Bismarck is probably a relative of George Soros)

You sir, are a demon. If Xenon13 takes up the challenge, I predict something similar to what we saw from Inuyasha on healthcare.