The False Premise

Progressives love to start an argument with a false premise.  "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no?"  Rigged questions are the tools of the con man and flim-flam artist.  Take the argument against the existence of God, for instance.

The Argument Begins

"You can show me no direct proof that God exists, therefore, God does not exist!"

This statement depends entirely on the false premise that a thing cannot exist unless it can be seen and touched or directly observed.  Plenty of things we know to exist based on indirect observation.  Black holes, for instance, cannot be seen, but only inferred from theories about gravity and astro-physics and by their effect on nearby objects in space.

It is almost axiomatic in the news media that the health care system in America is badly broken. I believe this to be a false premise.  From this false premise, the left makes the Socratic argument that "If the health care system is badly broken, then we must fix it and that if we must fix it, the government is the only entity that can do the job.

The flaw in that argument is three-fold.  (1) The US health care system is not broken, only oppressed by too much government regulation and interference.  (2) We must NOT fix it because attempts by central planners to fix things like health care only results in disaster again and again.  (3) The government is NOT the only entity that can fix the problem.  Government is, in fact, THE PROBLEM ITSELF.  Government diddling through Medicaid and Medicare is largely responsible for the bureaucratic tangle the health care system faces.

Then there is the cry for a national energy policy.  Why?  Have we not messed up our energy delivery system already.  We killed nuclear power plants - an excellent source of clean energy by regulating it to death. We have hamstrung oil, gas and coal producers so they cannot even prospect for oil off our own shores, but must give way to China and Brazil and the like. I can give you an energy policy.  Do not let the government diddle with energy production!

We must save the planet!  Another false premise.  Who says.  For one thing, we do not have the ability to save the planet and there is precious little evidence that we are the reason it is heating up anyway. Jupiter, Venus and Mars are all heating up too.  I don't think humans had anything to do with that. Besides, if we bankrupt ourselves, turn the US into a third world country and destroy Western civilization, we aren't going to make more than a fraction of a degree's impact on the world's temperature anyway.  And who says putting San Francisco and New York underwater is such a bad thing anyway?

Sometimes what we MUST do to fix problems is to stop meddling.  An ancient proverb says too many cooks spoil the stew. That applies to governments.  Why do we need endless task forces and select committees aided by battalions of politicians and legions of bureaucrats to do what we can do individually in our own communities, quite without help from the feds?

When I had a wound that had scabbed over, my Mom always told me "Don't pick at it or it will never heal!"

Good advice for the current administration and congress when faced with a bad economy.  Leave it alone or it will never heal.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Flint, TX