Package Deal Fallacy

Package Deal

[Amb] alt Intellectual Package Deal; false conjunction

The fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or “package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value. (Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It?) Assuming things that are often grouped together must always be grouped together, or the assumption that the ungrouping will have significantly more severe effects than anticipated.

Examples:

• Michael is part of the Jackson Five. Without Tito and company, he will never make it.
• If indoor smoking laws are passed for bars, the bars will go out of business since people who drink, smoke while they drink.
• A disastrous intellectual package deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. - Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal "America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business."

• I've become convinced that the terms "capitalism" and "socialism" are really anti-concepts of the package-deal variety. ...

  I think the word "capitalism," if used with the meaning most people give it, is a package-deal term. By "capitalism" most people mean neither the free market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter. Rather, what most people mean by "capitalism" is this free-market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term "capitalism" as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.

  And similar considerations apply to the term "socialism." Most people don't mean by "socialism" anything so precise as state ownership of the means of production; instead they really mean something more like "the opposite of capitalism." Then if "capitalism" is a package-deal term, so is "socialism" — it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism, as though these were one and the same. - Roderick T. Long, Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later

• The terms "globalist" and "isolationist" are often used as package deal terms, since each can refer to two entirely different spheres - politics and trade.

  Policy	Political Isolationist	Political Globalist
  Economic Isolationist	Insular Society Feudalism	Mercantilism Neo-Mercantilism
  Economic Globalist	Free Market Liberalism	Corporatism Neo-Liberalism