Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Hard cases and bad laws

There is an old saying that hard cases make bad law. One of the arguments used against the abolition of slavery was that elderly widows depended on them. Elderly widows are wheeled out whenever the issue of land value taxation is raised - the example given is of the 95 year old woman whose husband bought a 2-up-2-down slum terrace house in 1946 for £100 with his demob money and now the site it is standing on is worth a million. Under a system of land value taxation she would be subject to a heavy tax even though she has only her meagre pension to live on and the house itself is falling down, has no bathroom and only an outside toilet.


Campaigners for tougher abortion laws face the same kind of thing. Opponents ask, "What about women who have become pregnant as a result of rape?" Or "What about pregnancies where tests have shown that the baby, if born, would be seriously disabled and a burden on the parents?"


Those who are campaigning for changes like this are generally not so stupid as to realise that there may be situations where exceptions to a principle may have to be made or dealt with in a more accomodating way.

Picking on hard cases is a dishonest debating technique which is used by people who are wholly opposed to whatever it is that is being suggested. One might as well argue against speed limits on the grounds that someone might be on their way to the hospital with an acutely ill passenger in the car.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer