Uncle Joe and the "plausible" argument

Joe Biden provided a wonderful illustration this week of my Theses 6 and 8.

These theses hold generally that: Increases to government spending or programs that benefit special interest groups are always justified by noble-sounding, plausible arguments about promoting the general welfare:

• when we increase teachers' pay, we are "helping the children;"
• when we increase the pay of policemen, firefighters, and prison guards, we are "improving public safety;"

If funds for these special interest groups are cut, we are told, catastrophic consequences will ensue. In fact, the extra money spent often does not result in a significant increase to the general welfare, but only serves to pad the salaries and pensions of public service employee unions, who, in turn, fund the political campaigns of those politicians who supported the increases.

Mr. Biden stood in a room of the Capitol backed by row upon row of uniformed police officers, firefighters, and teachers and declaimed:

In Flint, Michigan, they cut their force in half; murder rates have doubled in the last year ... Police departments, as I said, in some cases literally cut in half, like Camden, New Jersey, and Flint, Michigan. In many cities, the result has been -- and it's not unique -- murder rates are up, robberies are up, rapes are up ... I said rape was up, three times in Flint. There are the numbers. Go look at the numbers.

The implication is that if you vote for Republicans, you will be raped.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker, Glen Kessler, has written a marvelous refutation of Mr. Biden's claims:

In other words, even if you could make a link, it is likely one of many factors that affects the crime rate, not the single one, as Biden suggests. The FBI itself lists more than a dozen variables in what causes crime to increase in a community. Others believe the connection is tenuous, at best. “There is limited or no correlation between the number of officers and the homicide rate,” said David Carter, a Michigan State University criminal justice professor who works with the Justice Department to track homicides. “To draw any kind of conclusion on simply the number of officers and the number of homicides is virtually meaningless. There are too many other variables that will influence the commission of homicides as well as clearances. In essence, the reporting of this simple data, whether using Biden's data or city data, does not describe changes in the incidents of homicides in Flint or any city.

So, once again we have a liberal, progressive politician making the "plausible" argument that increasing pay and benefits for members of public service employee unions will achieve a noble-sounding result, improve the general welfare, and preclude catastrophic consequences, when, in fact, what is happening is that the politician is simply seeking to make sure that the governmental special interest unions that support him are well-funded so that their dues can continue to flow into his campaign coffers.

Plain and simple, this is corruption and political payoff of the most vile kind.

The Democrats keep talking about how awful the world will be if the Republicans are elected. How much worse could it get? Unemployment is running above 9% by the most optimistic figures. We have run trillion dollar deficits for the last three years. Dependency on the government is at all time highs. The catastrophe is already upon us, and its name is Obamaism.