False Choices

Young Ben Shapiro's latest is interesting; he takes Obama for task for using the phraseology of "false choices," which he describes as childish.

And so Obama claimed in the Chicago Tribune that Americans “need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy.” That choice, he said, is a “false choice.” It is a false choice as he phrases it -- capitalism isn’t chaotic and unforgiving. But the simple choice between capitalism and a government-managed economy is a real choice -- and it’s the most important choice Americans have faced in half a century. Obscuring the need to make that choice by glossing over it with happy talk does a profound disservice to the American people.

It is in fact a false choice, Shapiro. It presents, as Conservatives tend to these days, two poles. The pure pristine clarity of unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism verses, in a word, communism. But the truth is that it there is a long continuity between those two poles. Conservatives are trying to blur that distinction right now to suggest that any proposal Obama puts forwards is a step on the way to Communism; but I don't know how successful they are going to be.