INGERSOLL: Assailed By The ‘One-Is-Too-Many’ Crowd? Here’s The Antidote

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Greetings, Dear Reader,

There’s a lot going on. The cars have passed by, the goals have been drug back out, and Trump has declared the war with Iran back on. Platner is who we thought he was. The shock!

But when everyone zigs, I’m going to zag.

I’m sure you’ve encountered the false positive fallacy recently.

THE FALSE POSITIVE FALLACY

It’s a common refrain: “One is too many.”

In its most basic application, it’s a call for reinvigorated policy or increased support. One hungry child is too many. One homeless veteran is too many. In this form, it’s assumed figurative. Nobody really expects to house every mentally ill veteran by year’s end. They just want a bigger effort.

In its most mentally ill form, “one is too many” operates as a rhetorical set of brakes. Its use is tantamount to ending a policy altogether, so we can “reform” or, in extreme cases, “abolish.”

One unarmed black man shot by police is too many.

That was the most recent and most pernicious deployment of OITM political cudgel. It had disastrous results, starting with a national political platform that posited, with all seriousness, abolishing the police.

Citing peer-reviewed studies on the resulting Ferguson Effect – in which police pulled back from problem neighborhoods, either due to lack of will or resources – I asked Claude to estimate the excess murders and violent felonies that occurred in the following years.

“If you want........

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