Nancy Falosi
Nancy Pelosi’s Fallacy: Here’s a part of how Nancy Pelosi justified her party’s decision to include family planning and contraceptive funding in the stimulus plan working its way through Congress. “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” Representative Pelosi has crammed two enormous errors into this one small statement.
First, she is wrong economically. Some people will not like being faced with it, but she has fallen into the same mistake made by those who are afraid immigrants (illegal immigration is a different problem—a legal one, not an economic one) who will come into the U.S. only to take our jobs and ship our money back overseas. Ms. Pelosi sees these potential infants as potential mouths which must be fed and which, while eating, will be consuming the food which ought to be preserved for us. Not only is her perspective maliciously egoistic, it is also simply wrong. Before the Enlightenment, kings, nations, and merchants believed they were all competing for a limited pie—that the success of one implied the proportionate failure of another; hence, mercantilism. Another economist, Robert Thomas Malthus, in the wake of the Enlightenment embraced the same basic concept, but not necessarily nationalistically. But fortunately, even before Malthus, economists had realized that the size of an economy is not actually fixed and that, as a matter of fact, the more people there are being productive, the more goods and services there are (or can be) for everyone in that economy. More mouths to feed are also more hands to plant and harvest. Indeed, more mouths to feed are more consumers to buy food from grocers, farmers, and restauranteurs, who in turn can buy supplies from hardware stores and wholesalers, and so on. It is not difficult economics.
Second, she is wrong morally. Even if the existence of others is an impingement on what we have, we cannot regard their existence as negative. So Ms. Pelosi couches her argument in terms of children’s health. There is a difference between saying that a child with CF should be able to live without the disease, and saying that it is better for a child with CF not to live (hence also the misnomer of “therapeutic abortion”). And there is a difference between promoting the health of children and promoting either their destruction before birth or the prevention of their conception. Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that contraception is wrong. I am saying that it is not a children’s health issue. I understand that Ms. Pelosi would claim that having fewer children is good for those that remain, but that argument’s error is highlighted in the paragraph above. And I understand that she means “family” health, not specifically “children’s” health, but that distinction is precisely my point.
The parochial and selfish exclusion of others from the economy and even from the merits of existence should not taint the leadership of a country whose virtue is to invite the outcasts of other lands. But it does, and for no good reason.
Tags: Economics
I like this comment:
“More mouths to feed are also more hands to plant and harvest. Indeed, more mouths to feed are more consumers to buy food from grocers, farmers, and restauranteurs, who in turn can buy supplies from hardware stores and wholesalers, and so on.”
Maybe this is why God gave us two hands and two feet and only one mouth. It surprises me that people whose job it is to lead a country allow themselves to fall into this type of backwards thinking. I dream of a country where children are viewed as the hope for our future and not a burden of the present.