The Fallacy of the Middle Ground: The Case of the O'Reilly Spin Zone

One of my favorite posters here reads my blog to balance the views of left wing blogs. He believes that if he sees all sides, he can find the moderate view, the happy medium, that is truthful because it takes all views into account. This is something like a Fox television program, the O'Reilly Spin Zone, where the announcer claims to be "balanced". O'Reilly, however, is anything but balanced. He gives two rather extreme points of view, call them the Progressive Republican and the progressive Democratic, then he splits the difference between them. The O'Reilly Spin Zone is characterized by its persistent omission of the most important issues facing the nation, especially monetary policy and the Federal Reserve Bank, which O'Reilly seems to believe is unimportant compared to the activities of shadowy speculators. Given that monetary policy is the one issue of crucial importance to his working class viewers, his claim that he "looks out for his viewers" is especially vicious.

There is no such thing as a happy medium much of the time. O'Reilly's claim is nonsensical. The truth does not lie in the middle. For instance, in the 18th century Dr. Benjamin Rush advocated bleeding as a cure for various illnesses. Today, physicians use antibiotics. Is the truth in the middle? Do you want your doctor to use bleeding half the time and antibiotics the other half? Or is bleeding based on an erroneous theory, so you are hopeful that your doctor dispenses with it?

How about astronomy in ancient Greece? I think it was Parmenides who believed that the universe was a sphere with the earth at the center, while Democritus believed that the earth revolved around the sun. Would a balanced view, that the center of the universe was midway between the earth and the sun, have been accurate? Or was the truth of the matter irrelevant to what either Parmenides or Democritus had to say?

In the 1920s Ludwig von Mises argued for the importance of price in the functioning of an economy, and that socialist coordination would be inefficient because of the absence of price. In the 1930s, Oskar Lange claimed to have disproven von Mises's arguments because socialist planners could equate marginal revenue product and price, but his argument is so laden question begging and circular reasoning that it is difficult to believe that anyone would have take it seriously. Yet, academic economists and sociologists for many years seriously stated that Lange had disproven von Mises. Many prominent scholars, such as Clark Kerr, advocated a "consensus" view of the "convergence" of capitalism and socialism in the 1950s. But this view of a happy medium was patently false. It was an extreme fallacy to say that there would be convergence. Von Mises and Hayek were right, Lange and Kerr were wrong. Kerr's "medium" view of socialism was an extreme one. Von Mises's and Hayek's view of the efficiency of information in a capitalist economy was an accurate and moderate one.

In 1989 the Soviet Union fell for the very reasons that von Mises and Hayek said it would. But not one of the academic economists or sociologists who insisted on the nonsensical convergence theory, the ancient idea of the happy medium, admitted that convergence was wrong because socialism failed. Rather, many continued to advocate socialism and to apologize for Lange's argument.

Today, we see on Fox News continued advocacy of the convergence doctrine, support for the bailout and the like, views which coincidentally favor the interests of Rupert Murdoch and various other contributors to the American Enterprise Institute, interests which do not have O'Reilly's viewers' happiness in mind.

There is no medium. Socialism fails because it interferes with the communication of information. Cognitive limits of socialist managers inhibit innovation. There is no in between. You either reward people fully for their innovation, or you don't. If you don't you get less innovation. You get the bailout, failed firms like Citibank and General Motors receiving massive taxpayer subsidies in the name of the "economy" and economically illiterate bozos on Fox telling us that it is good that the large firms steal from us. We should be grateful because it is midway between what the Republicans say and what the Democrats say. The bailout reflects the middle ground between the two. It must be right.

The fallacy of the middle ground may have evolved from a misinterpretation of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that virtue is typically the mean, so that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. There is a difference between ethics and science, though. Aristotle did not claim that truth was the middle ground, only that virtue is. It seems likely that those who believe in "moderation" and "the middle ground" are confused between virtue and truth. The truth depends on an accurate depiction of how the world behaves. The middle ground between two nonsensical views, such as those of the Democrats and the Republicans, is neither moderate nor truthful.