** The sum of the parts
Topics: Health, Theory
13 Apr 1994
From: ervan
In several different contexts recently, I have heard arguments based on
the notion that collections of people have some first class sort of
existance greater than the sum of the individuals themselves. I think
this is a dangerous summary to use because only people can be happy or
sad, rich or poor, sick or healthy. Anthromorphizing the collection
allows the reality of it to be obscured.
The first example is health care. Frequently one hears about the
'health of the country' (wrt medical care). This is nonsense. The
country is not a living organism that is healthy or ill. It is a
collection of people that are healthy or ill. If it were just a
metaphor, that would be understandable, but it has instead come to mean
something deliberately amorphous so that supporters of reform can avoid
the hard question of whose health is improved and whose is hurt. Using
these terms tends to bias the debate towards the assumption that
collectively we should spend a certain amount on health care (and
collectively consume that amount). For instance, one particular point
to come from this is that several of the alternates to Clinton's plan
flat out force individuals to buy a certain high level of insurance for
themselves, regardless of whether they want it or can afford it.
Another is that one commonly hears the euphimism "single payer".
That's nonsense, it's 135M payers (number of taxpayers in the U.S.).
Somehow single payer makes it sound like the burden has gone away and a
rich uncle is picking up the tab.
Another example of this mentality is the corporate income tax. The
liberal defenses of the corporate income tax that I have heard all go
something like: 'Corporations are like wealthy individuals and they
should pay their (progressive) share'. This is pure nonsense again.
Corporations cannot have income, they are not conscious entities in
their own right. Only individuals can have income. Taxing corporate
profits has lots of ill effects. First, it's a regressive consumption
tax (since corporate income tax is passed on in the form of higher
prices or withdrawal from the market). Second, it has the marginal
effect of inducing corporations to use debt (interest is deductible)
instead of stock (dividends are taxed twice) to finance operations.
Third, it introduces serious frictional costs involved in all of the
special accounting (and tax lawyers) needs to comply with the law. It's
purported benefit of relieving part of the tax burden the poor would
otherwise have to bear is economic nonsense.
On the matter of corporations, the same twisted reasoning is applied to
free speech. The liberal argument goes that corporations are not
individuals and are thus not protected by the First Amendment. Well,
first of all, the First Amendent does NOT say 'Individuals have a right
to free speech'. It says 'Congress shall make no law [...] abridging
the freedom of speech', an entirely negative statement about what the
government cannot do. Leaving that issue aside, the notion that
corporations are entities with an agenda separate from that of the
individuals which run or own them is the fallacy at hand. Corporations
say nothing except what individuals want them to say. They are merely
a convenient organ for saying it for a group of people of like mind.
By declaring the entity different than the individuals composing it, a
right is denied. In case you are wondering, the Supreme Court has
generally held that the First Amendment does not protect advertisement.
Returning to the government itself, the most insidious and destructive
version of this fallacy is summed up in the saying 'everyone should
have a voice in their government'. What does this mean? It means that
the majority should be able to act tyrannically. The government is not
some organism, it is coercion on its citizens. What if I said
'everyone should have a right to steal from their neighbor'? That
would be instantly rejected. But yet that is exactly what the 'voice
in government' argument means. By anthromorphizing government, people
have denied the consequences of their voting behavior based on hardly
more than the twist of a euphimism.
---Ervan
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