Beware Liberals Who Hijack Right-Wing Arguments

Recently there have been quite a few cases of liberals arguing in favor of certain public policies on the basis of principles that they usually oppose or, at a minimum, ignore. For example, a concerted media campaign is underway arguing that we should increase the minimum wage so that people with jobs are not also collecting government benefits. Yet the people behind the campaign are not people who normally argue for either less government spending or fewer handouts to lower income people. Generally, when you notice somebody arguing using the other side's principles, that should be a signal that their argument is a weak one.

As part of the bipartisan 1996 welfare reform, federal government policy was changed in order to make sure that working was more financially rewarding than being on welfare. Thus began a path that took us to the current situation where millions of people who work also collect government benefits, even individuals who work full-time. A person can collect food stamps, heating assistance, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit all while being employed. As one earns more, these benefits are designed to shrink slowly so that workers are not discouraged from trying to earn more. Most of the benefits are gone by the time one reaches earnings in the $25,000 per year range, but the earned income tax credit can be collected by families that earn as much as $50,000 per year if they have enough kids.

The idea that people who work should not collect government benefits is not normally a liberal idea, as liberals usually advocate for income redistribution and favor a helping hand for people in the lower part of the income distribution. In fact, Obamacare just added a new government benefit that can be collected by families earning over $90,000 per year for a family of four. Clearly, liberals do not object in principle to working people collecting government benefits.

So why do liberals make this argument? Because they know the direct argument is a weak one. They do not have any facts to justify an increase in the minimum wage. There is no data on productivity gains or any other factor involved in the setting of wages that can be used to show that low-wage workers "deserve" more money. Since the proponents of raising the minimum wage cannot justify such a policy directly, some of them are choosing an indirect approach and trying to gain supporters by appealing to something that conservatives believe in. Their hope is that some conservatives will favor smaller government strongly enough to overcome their reluctance to impose more regulation and higher labor costs on employers.

A similar vein was taken recently by environmentalists hoping to block future U.S. natural gas exports. Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, has increased U.S. natural gas production so much that several companies are looking to build export facilities and ship liquefied natural gas to Europe and other markets around the world. Environmentalists oppose this idea because they do not want to see anything that might increase the use of fossil fuels or could encourage more fracking, which they fear has negative environmental consequences. Rather than making an argument on environmental grounds, however, they have chosen to claim we should block natural gas exports in order to keep natural gas prices low here at home.

Given that these are exactly the same people who want high carbon taxes in order to raise fossil fuel prices and encourage us all to reduce our use of such energy, their sudden worry about high gas prices strikes me as rather disingenuous. This is a case of environmentalists not believing their anti-fossil fuel argument can attract a majority in favor of restricting exports of natural gas; therefore, they use a substitute argument designed to appeal to people on the other side.

Another obvious example is when liberals, President Obama chief among them, call for tax increases in order to help reduce the budget deficit. These calls do not come from people who actually care about reducing the budget deficit. The real motivation for the proposed tax increases is income redistribution; the appeal to fiscal responsibility is yet again simply a ploy designed to attract a few budget hawks to their side.

This ploy is seen through rather easily when you notice that the proposed tax increases fall almost exclusively on the highest income earners. If it were truly a priority of liberals to reduce the budget deficit, they would propose a tax increase on everyone and argue that it is our patriotic duty to all join in the deficit reduction. What we see instead is simply another income redistribution scheme being promoted as deficit reduction in order to attract support.

Pushing a policy using arguments you normally disagree with is a sure sign that your policy proposal is not strongly supported by facts. It is a sign of weakness similar to the related ploy of policy by anecdote, when sympathetic people are paraded before the public as if national policy should be based on a few cherry-picked cases. Just remember, when your political opponents start stumping for their policies using arguments you would expect your side to be making, it is time to examine that policy's merits very closely.