Red herring (narrative), a technique used in literature to mislead the audience.
You provided two possibilities.... 1) we bailout the big 3 and save "millions" of jobs, or 2) we let them declare bankruptcy putting millions out of work.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt about it being a red herring but its still a fallacy of False Dilemma and an Appeal to consequences.
More fallacies: Appeal to probability, Appeal to consequences, False Dilemma and possibly an Appeal to fear.
Its true.. I would like to see everyone of able body and mind off of welfare. However, I believe you are confusing Unemployment benefits, which are temporary, with Welfare, which can be indefinite. While both are forms of basic welfare, the fact that unemployment is temporary makes all the difference to me.
While I won't disagree we need to use less oil, I challenge the idea that we can use less "foreign" oil and emphatically disagree that oil conservation needs to be mandated by government at all, much less through CAFE.
I would argue we will spend less money on unemployment benefits than we would on bailouts... Have you thought about that? Take the number of people who would be unemployed and use that number to divide the amount of bailout money that would go the companies: Roughly 14 billion dollars divided by 250,000 (worst case scenario) = $56,000 each.
As for people who invested in the company... the stock market is a gamble and there are no guarantees. That said... If you keep the company stock after it plummets, then the company goes through bankruptcy re-organization and emerges as a sustainable, profitable business, the investor will come out ahead over time.
Is this an appeal to emotion? Nothing could be less painful than allowing the free market to weed out unsustainable companies in order for the profitable ones to prosper and take their place.
Something for you to consider: Just over 2 million people lost their telemarketing jobs when the National Do-Not-Call list was put into effect... I don't recall anyone complaining about the loss of those jobs or talking about how painful or heartbreaking it would be... likely because its Non-Union work.
I reject this line of reasoning because it doesn't have to be this way. Personally, I'd like to see a shift from Left vs. Right to Statist vs. Non-Statist, so that's what I'm working to achieve.
You need to explain how money going to the banks direct from the treasury limits inflation but the transfer of goods and services causes inflation, since the money you spend ends up in the same banks anyway.
Unless you agree with the spending?
That's cool but I was specifically referring to those who like to blame "Conservatives" for things like reckless spending, wars, recessions and all other problems that we face as a nation.
I didn't call you a 'Lefty', I said your leftist buddies... As far as being a pragmatist, I'm not sure how you qualify that and in some cases, I think pragmatism is more destructive than ideological adherence.
I've already established that we are a welfare state... as far as equivocating to what degree.... Do you really think we are moving away from, and not towards, an expansion of the welfare state? Aside from that, when I was 18, and diagnosed with cancer, knowing that other people had worse cases gave me no solace. The only thing I found reassuring was that mine was operable. Thats the only thing that gives me hope for the future of America, we can still operate and remove the cancer before it kills us.
Name one truly comparable country... one that's got 300 million or more citizens and NOT hopelessly in debt as a result. Aside from that, I reject your premise that we don't afford "basic needs" to our citizenry.
Where does it work?
I don't follow, please explain.
Those who are found guilty of committing a felony are not eligible to receive benefits.
I didn't mean to cast dispersions on your particular generation, only the line of thought that our constitution is flawed and the founders were shortsighted. That seems to be a common theme with most contemporary generations.
When will you go from saying to demanding? Hopefully before its too late... I'm already there.
If I specifically meant real estate, I would have used that term. Anytime I use the term "property", its a reference to any tangible, or intangible, possession which I own or control.
So would it be your opinion that I don't have a right to keep what I own, earn, produce, create or inherit, but others have a "right" to what I have earned, produced, created or inherited, simply because they have some need that's unfulfilled and the ability to grant government the power to take it from me?
...experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Where will you draw the line on taxation? 40%, 50%, 60%???
We need a whole separate thread for this one... I'll sum it up by saying people are horribly ignorant of "what the founders had in mind"...
The path of Statism... Progressives on the Left and "Moderate" Republicans on the Right (Neo-Cons). That leaves the non-statist Liberals on the Left, Libertarians in the middle, and the Non-statist conservatives on the Right as natural allies against the statists in both parties.
Its stuff like missing the point about my theoretical welfare state eliminating felonious crimes that makes me think you don't really pay close attention to what I'm saying... or when you say that you "don't buy" that we are a welfare state, only to compare us to more extreme examples when you find that we are one.
What I don't want to do is have the typical Left vs. Right exchange. In that regard, I'm not trying to prove that one side is better than the other and your attitude seemed to be one that's common: "The Republicans are worse... so I'll support Democrats as the lesser of two evils" What I want, is to find people willing to scrutinize their own perceived party as harshly as they scrutinize the other... People like that are more likely to comprehend the idea of looking at politics from the perspective of Statist vs. Non-Statist terms. Once you look at politics from that perspective, you will see that the Non-Statists are always the "Good" who get overlooked and the Statists are the "Evil" from which we are stuck choosing between.
