Weekend Night Thoughts on the Rhetoric of Policy Argument Today

Two things that came across the transom this weekend:

First, Elizabeth Stoker Buenig writing on Civility [and] Outrage after being attacked for writing that it is morally questionable to seek fame and fortune by kicking down against those unfortunate enough not to have been born to the right parents or who have been unlucky in other ways.

I have always thought that there are three major sins of the intellect:

Cruelty--that is, kicking down in the hope that it will make the lives of the unlucky worse for, relative to the unlucky, contra John Donne the writer is indeed an island.

Laziness--that is, failing to inform oneself about the issues, and failing to think through the problems: failing to use your intelligence to any purpose.

Stubbornness--that is, failing to properly update one's beliefs when new evidence comes in, and turning instead to elaborating reasons for why the new evidence doesn't mean what it means: using one's intelligence for a malign purpose to keep yourself from properly marking one's beliefs to market.

I've always thought that when you cannot say that someone is being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn, but only "uncivil"--well, then you got nothing. And if people are being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn? Then it is a misdirection of effort to point out that they are uncivil. And that it is never uncivil to point out that people are being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn. Or perhaps it is better put as Adam Smith put it: that often "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent".

And just as I read this the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Strain crosses my desk:

Michael Strain: Conservatives, wake up: The tax code is not your biggest problem: "There are several problems facing the country today...

...more urgent than the tax code.... [1] The long-term unemployed.... I would employ a suite of policies to help get the long-term unemployed back to work before reforming the tax code. Long-term unemployment is a national emergency that belongs at the front of the line.... [2] Men of prime working age--too old to be in school and too young to be retired--are in flight from the labor force. The average labor force participation rate of prime-aged men in 1980 was 94.3 percent. The rate last month? Just 88 percent.... Conservative solutions to reform our schools... increase the generosity of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for childless workers.... Such policies are... more important to society and the economy today than tax reform.

[3] Our health-care system is in need of serious reforms. The Affordable Care Act is an ugly package.... It should be repealed and replaced with a conservative alternative. And health-care costs are projected to put Medicare and Medicaid spending on an unsustainable and destructive path, and are putting downward pressure on wages and salaries. I would make progress with conservative health-care reforms before worrying about tax reform...

Would it be uncivil for me to point out that there is not a word about what "conservative health-care reforms" might be? Would it be uncivil to point out that there is not a word about what the conservative "suite of policies to help the long-term unemployed get back to work" might be? Would it be uncivil to point out that there are no words about which "conservative... reform[s of] our schools" he advocates? (There are thirteen words about a real policy--"increase the generosity of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for childless workers"--but would it be uncivil to point out that that is not likely to have a great deal of purchase on the very real problem of "peak male"?

Back in the 1950s through the 1970s Michael Strain's predecessors had a technocratic message to deliver: that in the wake of victory over the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and the Great Depression the center and the left believed that government command-and-control and regulatory mandates could accomplish more than they in fact could. And back then conservatives were willing to hear that technocratic message. Would it be uncivil to point out that it looks to me like Michael Strain and most of his cohorts fear that today's conservatives are unreceptive to his technocratic message--so much so that they dare only to whisper it softly?