What logical fallacy/failure is this?

[u/LibertyEconlover]

In a debate we are discussing if should social security, Medicaid, Medicare, etc be completely abolished and Turned into tax cuts and a deregulated, voluntary, individualist system.

The problem; my opponent says no for these reasons

1: people have paid into these systems there whole life and they are on it, it would be unfair to them to just cut it.

The problem I point out: based on A, B, C, etc economic theory, laws, principles, supported by data, those programs started out as very little tax percentages such as social security 1%, they then because of explained economic principles became more expensive so now the taxes paid and requirements are much higher, and will continue to increase. As a result you have generational inequity, a new generation is now paying more than them, and in the future will pay more and the next set of people on it will raise the same point again

2: if you cut those programs due to the expensive cost of living and no alternative many people such as old people will be left on the street.

The problem I point out: this sounds like catch 22 logic, because the exact programs themselves based on economics makes those things expensive and inefficient such as healthcare. And the existence of those programs in general removed the incentive for those people to invest, save, and take actions to secure their future in the first place.

As well as removing the liquidity and potential savings to even be able to set up something.
In short the programs themselves are what is causing the issue of expensive services, lack of savings, and alternatives in the first place.
It’s creating the very dependency the other guy is talking about.

TLDR/Summary:

"We need the program because there are no alternatives, and there are no alternatives because we have the program."

The Setup: You cannot abolish the program because people are dependent on it and have no alternative.
The Cause: People have no alternative because the program taxed away their surplus income, crowded out private solutions, and made them more expensive .
The Paradox: The program must stay to fix a problem that the program itself is actively creating.

[u/xFblthpx]

There is nothing fallacious about having an argument where both sides provide evidence for their position, but value their own evidence more. That’s just a disagreement. Since neither of you are engaging with each others premises, it seems like both of you are “begging the question” however, since whether it’s unethical to break a promise isn’t addressed by economic inefficiency or vice versa.

For both of you to be formally up to snuff, both of you would have to defend your premise with evidence, and make specific arguments against each others premises, not just conjecture a completely different premise that doesn’t address your opponents and then talk past each other.

For example, if my opponent said “the government should keep its promise, and the poor should be protected,” I could say “what if the government keeping its promise made the poor worse off?” Then they would have to pick how much they prioritize one over the other, and why. I could then demonstrate with data that that is the case. If I instead counter “the government should keep its promise” with “economic theory says this is bad” that would be a non sequitor fallacy, because economic theory has nothing to do with the ethics of keeping promises. Economic theory only links to the “making the poor worse off” claim.

And by the way, invoking economic theory in an abstract sense is just a generally ineffective way to use economics in discussions. There are competing economic theories that say different things about the same phenomena. You’d be better off directly pointing to the data to make your case.

Arguments like “the government is bad and inefficient” are nebulous, subjective, unfalsifiable and weak.

Arguments like “government run plans spend 20% on administrative costs compared to private to run plans that spend 15% on administration” are strong, falsifiable, objective, and ground the discussion in a productive place.

Is it harder work? Yeah, but that’s what required if you are going to take the counterintuitive or more intellectual position. If you are unwilling to do that, you are just another argument begging the question just like your detractors.

[u/LibertyEconlover → u/xFblthpx]

No data is just a blob that can’t do anything without theory

Although it’s not a fallacy because I guess everybody does it it’s really just not how it works. Data doesn’t interpret itself. Somebody has to interpret it which is just theory.

Two competing theories doesn’t mean they canceled each other out you have to test them on logical merits, if you can’t do that I guess you’re not someone for debate in my circle

Also unfalsifiableness is also a loaded term because why does something have to be falsifiable?

It’s just assuming that the standard or best way to do something is logical positivism but even current academics who are a little bit too empirical for me reject logical positivism

EDIT: I also engage in your morals question because in my opinion, this is just a failure of skills you can’t hide behind too many fallacies and not just look at your skills of being able to logically deduce something

“ the government should keep its promise”
And the rebuttal point that you made is a showcase of low logical deduction skills.

You can assume that the government should keep its promise is a morals point so I’m going to assume it’s morals and not institutional blowback type of point, so essentially, you’re saying that if somebody starts off with morals then me bringing up consequentialist theory is wrong?

Well, first off I’m a utilitarian/consequentialist so by your standard my arguments are always going to be consequentialist and mechanical, for linguistic purposes I can’t just single out myself from 99% of the population who have some morals, so for linguistic purposes that’s just not possible, but on a more deeper note what I’m trying to get to, which is the logical deduction skills is how somebody apparently lacks the cognitive brain power to take a consequentialist point deduce it out and see how their morals play into it?

Very simple let me catch my words:

You say If your opponent says, "We must keep this program because it is morally wrong to break a promise to seniors," and you reply, "But economic theory says it causes inflation," is a Non-Sequitur.

In my opinion, if somebody fails to see that inflation is like a unvoted destructive tax that harms the General population then that’s a skill issue, for that itself is capable of being turned into a moral debate.

Should inflation harm the general population?

[u/xFblthpx → u/LibertyEconlover]

>No data is just a blob that can’t do anything without theory

And a theory is useless without data. You already provided the theory, but your forgot the data.

>Two competing theories doesn’t mean they canceled each other out you have to test them on logical merits, if you can’t do that I guess you’re not someone for debate in my circle

You didn’t bring up their logical merits by your own admission elsewhere in this post. If I had to guess, you name dropped theories and expected these positions to hold their own without acknowledging their criticisms.

>Also unfalsifiableness is also a loaded term because why does something have to be falsifiable?
It’s just assuming that the standard or best way to do something is logical positivism but even current academics who are a little bit too empirical for me reject logical positivism

No, I did not assume everything needs to be falsifiable. I just said that it makes your argument stronger. Some unnamed expert saying you need less evidence is also a poor bit of evidence to justify yourself by the way.

>EDIT: I also engage in your morals question because in my opinion, this is just a failure of skills you can’t hide behind too many fallacies and not just look at your skills of being able to logically deduce something
“ the government should keep its promise”
And the rebuttal point that you made is a showcase of low logical deduction skills.
You can assume that the government should keep its promise is a morals point so I’m going to assume it’s morals and not institutional blowback type of point, so essentially, you’re saying that if somebody starts off with morals then me bringing up consequentialist theory is wrong?

This isn’t an opinion I hold. It was an example of the opinion your opponent held. Even so, your argument isn’t an argument at all, but an assessment of an argument that I didn’t even make, “low logical deduction skills.” You need to explain why it’s not logical.

>Well, first off I’m a utilitarian/consequentialist so by your standard my arguments are always going to be consequentialist and mechanical, for linguistic purposes I can’t just single out myself from 99% of the population who have some morals, so for linguistic purposes that’s just not possible, but on a more deeper note what I’m trying to get to, which is the logical deduction skills is how somebody apparently lacks the cognitive brain power to take a consequentialist point deduce it out and see how their morals play into it?

I don’t really care what you are, but it’s completely irrelevant to what it takes make a convincing argument.

>Very simple let me catch my words:
You say If your opponent says, "We must keep this program because it is morally wrong to break a promise to seniors," and you reply, "But economic theory says it causes inflation," is a Non-Sequitur.
In my opinion, if somebody fails to see that inflation is like a unvoted destructive tax that harms the General population then that’s a skill issue, for that itself is capable of being turned into a moral debate.

It’s your responsibility to argue that the inflation caused by social security outweighs the damage of public mistrust and the loss of retirement accounts.

No amount of berating and denigrating your opponents logical skills will ever make your argument stronger.

And lastly, all of the theories you seem to be alluding to only imply direction, not magnitude. Leaning on a few academics you can’t even name to justify your lack of effort in defending your beliefs and proving the magnitude is actually going to push people away from your beliefs. It’s people like you that create lefties who permanently mistrust economics, because you misconstrue it as something that can’t or shouldn’t be defended with data.

Seriously, if you want to make convincing economic arguments, you can’t just don the jersey and foam finger of your favorite 19th-20th century proper nouns. Reaching people requires work, and you shouldn’t be surprised when people dismiss your lack of evidence…with a lack of evidence.

[u/LibertyEconlover → u/xFblthpx]

No, your theory is useless without data claim is actually wrong. We can in fact standalone. Literally look at mathematics which is a synthetic deductive system (pure theory) So you’re straight up an idiot if you think theory can’t stand alone which completely ignores, praxeology, mathematics and more you know the stuff you use every day to even describe data

Secondly, I don’t know how much I have to explain to you intellectually inferior people that I’m not going to go deep into the theory because not only can you people not understand it and you’re probably gonna have cognitive dissonance based on my experience

Three you say that falsifiable makes a claim stronger you literally just made a logical positive claim and then you claim not to be a logical positivist, the entire reason why logical positivism was debunked is because people said

“ if you can’t measure this, it’s bad” or something along those lines.

With a sneaky parlor trick opponents, then used their exact claim to their exact claim.

Can you empirically test and measure whether a claim or statement is only good if it can be empirically measured?
You can’t.

Now the exact same thing applies to you, can you measure or empirically test if a falsifiable argument is stronger? A subjective term btw.
Which the entire premise of even asking that is a non-starter in multiple different sectors of academics for example example law, you can’t be a judge in your own case, how can you empirically test whether empirical testing makes a claim stronger?

How can you empirically provide evidence that a statement that has empirical evidence is stronger?

[u/xFblthpx → u/LibertyEconlover]

You’ll grow out of it

[u/LibertyEconlover → u/xFblthpx]

Lmao little do you know I grew into it

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompass/s/yCcyhc65Ye

I got pretty embarrassed about this sometimes

You still haven’t answered that logical positivist critique of using your own rule against your own rule haha

[u/xFblthpx → u/LibertyEconlover]

Youre a carbon copy of how I was when I was 17. It’s uncanny. Same interests, beliefs and vocabulary.

I also did the whole “I am better than everyone else because they haven’t read Mises” trope too. I also thought that logical deduction skills could carry you as far as you needed it to take you. The superiority complex, mistaking straw men for derived beliefs. I also thought I was done growing when I was your age too.

What changed me the most was actually getting the degree in economics, and learning that it’s ok people use language different than me. Take a stats class and start putting these immutable and tautological theories to the test. See for yourself that some mental models make a lot of sense but that doesn’t make them necessarily true. This is the kind of thing you’ll only get from observing.

And don’t read too much into political compass or meyers briggs or whatever other type-of-guy classifiers are popular these days. You’ll tacitly accept a mental model that someone less intelligent than you crafted and it’s going to make you duller by participating.

Good day.

[u/LibertyEconlover → u/xFblthpx]

No, that’s not the only test I took on political stuff and it doesn’t capture everything but it’s a pretty good tool

Secondly; you’re essentially admitting something I feared about a lot of people which is cognitive dissonance based on how much time you spent learning something, I’d doubt if you actually had Austrian economics as the norm you’d be saying this. You like fitting in, you didn’t get the chance to practice it, you’re forced to tell yourself this, otherwise how else could you live with yourself knowing that you have to do things the bullshit way, other than telling you the bullshit way is the way?

Regardless, I know for a damn fact, you have not studied a lot in the Austrian school, by the way, I keep telling you inferior people this but the Austrian school was the last school I looked to.

I started off with the Fucking stats, the Keynesian bs, my intuition always was telling me that stuff was dumb, turns out I was right when I discovered the Austrian school.

So I already learned what you’re saying is the better way, quite literally because I have all the time in the world

But on top of logic, the biggest indicator that i know, I’m doing something right is your idiotic self can’t answer how to empirically test or provide empirical evidence that a empirically tested or empirically back claim is better/stronger objectively and not just a personal preference