David McElroy

Republicans love the free market. They hate socialism and big government. Conservative southern Republicans are some of the most vocal about cutting the size of government and cutting federal subsidies. It’s a pity they don’t really mean their rhetoric.

On Wednesday, the Obama administration proposed one of the few things it’s ever proposed that I thought was a great idea. Included in the 2014 budget is a plan to sell the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) so it will be a private utility instead of a government monopoly. That would shrink the size of government and cut out subsidies for millions of people in the South who are getting electricity at cheap rates.

Republicans should have been cheering this great news. TVA is the country’s largest electric utility. Selling it would be a perfect demonstration of what Republicans have been talking about for years. GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proposed in 1964 that TVA be privatized (and he lost Tennessee as a result). So how did modern Republican stalwarts against big government react?

In Alabama, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks both reacted negatively. Shelby didn’t outright dismiss the plan, but anyone who can read through political language knows what his statement means.

“I intend to carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA to ensure that it continues to deliver affordable electricity throughout the region without continuing to add to our nation’s rapidly growing debt,” Shelby told the Huntsville Times.

Brooks told the times that he’s willing to study the proposal, but, “Quite frankly, I am skeptical the president can make that case.”

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There’s nothing like a good old fashioned tragedy on the news to make a political point. Whether we admit it or not, most of us unconsciously feel this way. An anecdote is a cheap and easy way to score a point, but is it really good in the long run for public discourse? Maybe not.

You might have heard about the knife attack at a Houston college campus Tuesday that injured at least 15 people, sending 12 of them to hospitals. As soon as I saw the news, I thought about what gun-control advocates would be saying about the story if the assailant had used a gun. So I posted a sarcastic comment about it on Facebook.

“Police in Houston say 15 people were stabbed on a college campus there today,” I wrote. “This is proof that it’s time to get serious about banning assault knives — since they clearly have no purpose other than stabbing innocent people.”

A number of other people who agree with me on the issue of gun rights agreed and chimed in with their own comments. It felt good, because there was a story that illustrated very clearly what we believed. We felt that it made our point and that felt emotionally good.

I’ve been thinking about this tendency to use “anecdote as argument” a lot lately, and I’m not really happy with it, even though I do it as much as anybody else does.

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We all think that what we believe is right. We’ve been taught principles of right and wrong all our lives. We’ve thought about what the principles mean and we’ve decided which narrative of morality we believe is right. Sadly, most of us want something else, too. We want others to endorse our view of morality.

The whole issue of gay marriage has become a battle between two sides wanting to “make a statement” about right and wrong — and forcing others to go along with them — rather than finding a legal solution that respects everybody’s rights. This battle is fierce enough that passionate people on both sides aren’t really interested in a principled solution to get government out of the marriage business. For those people, it’s a social battle to force “society” to endorse their position.

On the surface, the issue seems to be about how everyone can be treated equally by the law while respecting individuals’ very different beliefs about the underlying issue of homosexuality. If that were truly the only issue to deal with, we have a solution. Eliminate marriage licenses and get government out of the business of deciding what a marriage is. But that’s no longer what this is about. Here’s what the two sides really seem to be saying:

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