On Politics and Asking the Wrong Question…
By: A.M. Wilson
Tags: Politics, Political Science, Debate, United States, Political Discourse

How many sixth-grade civics classes have pushed for the answer to this simple question, “What do you believe?” Debate naturally follows from this simple query, and often it centers on the application of belief, or “What is the right type of government?”

Yet, this question yields only one answer: autocracy.

Let me explain. The question, when argued and continued down their logical paths, lack a sufficient basis to achieve a compromise. The question itself requires one side be “right” and one side “wrong.”

It’s no wonder that the ends of the political spectrum below have yielded dictatorships.

Sometimes “anarchism” appears on the far left side of this diagram. That doesn’t make sense for a spectrum describing a political ideology as applied to governance, as anarchism is the lack of government. There could be a “anarchism spectrum,” but that’s a different post.

Let’s look at the argument structure of an extreme form of government, using the Socratic method:

Moderate: I think people should be taken care of.

Socrates: And how should they be taken care of?

Liberal: Through government programs, through welfare, and more.

Socrates: What of private industry? Doesn’t that take care of people.

Liberal: Well, sure, but it also requires money. Many people don’t have money. We need to give them the basic ability to take care of themselves.

Socrates: But how? Who will pay the hospital costs or the costs for food?

Socialist: Well, the government will. And, if it needs to, it can take over the institutions that people need to survive — basic goods like food, clothing, shelter and medicine can be taken care of by the government.

Socrates: And what about the people who currently make these things, how will you convince them to provide these things to everyone?

Socialist: We’ll pay for them; the government will pay for them. Through taxing the wealthy.

Socrates: But, if you take away their products to give away and pay them only by taxing them on their wealth, won’t they reach a point when they can’t pay?

Communist: Then we’ll take them by force. We’ll have the people put into collective farming and mining institutions, and we’ll punish the greedy former owners who wouldn’t help.

This is a somewhat extreme example, but it also demonstrates how one thought, when pursued to its conclusion can yield results that deviate far from the intended purpose. It does not matter the side that one takes, left or right, the end result is the same — dictatorship. I chose left, as I lean that way politically, and felt it would remove bias from my analysis.

If the moderate’s primary goal was to take care of people, he certainly lost it by the time he was inclined to punish the greedy former owners of industry and taking over the farms, mines, hospitals, etc. by force. At each point in the questioning, he could have stopped and considered the other side, and reached the conclusion that the criticism had merit and that he can, and should, reach a compromise.

The biggest problem in seeking a logical answer to “what is the right form of government,” or “what is the right way to rule,” is that it gives too much weight to an extreme answer as valid. If we took the above spectrum and applied a simple bell curve, we’d find that the ends have very, very small populations.