This question continues to be a puzzle until you realize that when Maddow says “America,” she means not individual Americans or society but government. And now her fallacy is clear. Frédéric Bastiat identified it in 1850. In his classic, The Law, Bastiat wrote that the “socialist” confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education… We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
I can see Maddow saying that. One need not be a state socialist, however, to commit this fallacy. It’s done all the time all along the political spectrum. But Maddow offers us a particularly good example.
A day and a half to go for your last chance to be part of the Kickstarter project. I’ve put up a small excerpt from the book in my latest update, to drum up support in the last couple days.
The Augustine panel noted that if the goal isn’t space settlement, there’s no point in having a human spaceflight program at all. The private people (such as Elon Musk) get this, but Congress continues to fail to do so.
You’d think with all of the money they spend on it, they’d get better results, but it’s almost impossible to prove discrimination, even though it’s obvious to everyone that it is occurring.
Per capita federal expenditures have almost doubled since Carter, and go up almost regardless of which party is in the White House. Ironically, it was steady only under Bill Clinton, but that’s only because he gave himself a Republican Congress in the second year of his first term. George W. Bush had an opportunity top get it under control, but he was a disaster on that front (the biggest reason he lost the Congress in 2006, which led to even more disastrous spending).