To A Hammer...

There’s an old adage that reads, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s a notion that pops into my head all the time when I witness people of a big-government bent offering opinions on societal problems. Every remedy starts and ends with “government should...” without a moment’s thought as to whether non-government remedies might be better. To the statist, such thoughts never occur.

I was again reminded of this when reading the comments under a post that referenced the abortion debate. Somebody quipped:

The Right only cares about babies until they are born.

It’s not an original thought. I’ve seen it, verbatim or near-verbatim, dozens of times.

The Internet is full of parrots. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with repeating or paraphrasing someone else’s well-constructed utterance, we should take a moment and ponder whether what we are repeating actually holds water.

In this case, we witness a logical fallacy. Whether you want to call it a straw man or begging the question, it rests on the presumption that, because the stereotypical person of the Right opposes government spending on child care, that person does not care about babies.

Yet another textbook example of “when all you have is a hammer...”

While there is a moral imperative in any society to care for children whose parents cannot - for whatever reason - how that care is provided is a broad question that should not simply be left as “government should...”

Government is demonstrably terrible at caring for children, for one thing. For another, it’s terribly inefficient in its use of resources. It also displaces, often deliberately and forcefully, non-government efforts. How many aspects of societal care for displaced children are made worse by government’s monopolistic authority?

Side note: I am, as usual, not commenting on the abortion debate itself. Here is the extent of my public commentary on the matter.

The quoted quip also bypasses the abortion debate,. It’s intended as a put-down and an insult, because that’s how many on the Left operate. Even as those, however, it fails, simply because it’s not the “gotcha” the commenter thinks it is. Outside leftist echo chambers, where the idea that people can actually get together and solve problems without involving some coercive central authority is utterly alien, people understand that government is often the worst* answer to a problem. And even if it’s not, it’s certainly not the only answer.

Of course, the Leftist form of “caring” doesn’t live up to any normal definition. Caring is not transitive. You do not prove you care by telling the person with the badge and gun to take money from someone else to do what you want done. That’s just a cop-out. A pretense to caring to paper over laziness, guilt for not doing something, and guilt for taking the easy way out of “he’s got more money than me, let’s force him to take care of the problem.”

Again, hammer, meet nail.

Before anyone says “government should…,” they should ask “should government…?” I think we would find that, far more often than not, the best answer will be “No.”