Health Care Summit: The Fallacy of Composition

Watching today's Health Care Summit, one of the most common statements Obama and the Democrats make supporting the health care bill is the idea that, when polled, American's support all of its parts so they should support the whole.

"There have been a lot of comments from every Republican about the polls," President Obama said near the end of the mind-numbing White House summit on health care reform. "What's interesting is when you poll people about the individual elements in each of these bills, they're all for them."

The logical problem with this reasoning is known as the fallacy of composition. It goes back to classical Greece and ancient China, but somehow has been forgotten today. Are people taught the rules of logic anymore? Let us refresh our collective memories.

The fallacy of composition is claiming that something is true of the whole because it is true of its parts, or all of its parts. For example, it is a fallacy to claim that an airplane cannot fly because none of its parts can fly. Just because no part of the airplane is capable of flight, this does not mean that the airplane itself cannot fly

In the case of the health care bill, the fact that the parts of the bill fly, does not mean the bill as a whole is flies. Of course, the polls that the politicians refer to do not cover all the parts of the bill. They only ask people if they want the benefits of the bill. It is no reason that the benefits are desirable. For some mysterious reason these polls never ask people if they prefer the costs.

Sun Tzu, of course, taught that costs must not only always be considered, but always be considered first, because costs are always more certain. Costs always come first. This is certainly true of the health care bill where we pay ten years of costs for six years of benefits (3.1 Strategic Economics).

The president says that taking small steps as the Republicans suggest will not work, but that idea flies in the face of Sun Tzu's strategic principles regarding using small steps to eliminate waste and minimize mistakes. Think of the health care bill as an meal. Imagine putting every dish that you liked into a single meal and committing to pay for that meal and eating it all before sitting down. Each course in the meal can be great by itself, but that doesn't mean you want to eat them all together, if only because more is often not better. Even if the various parts didn't conflict with each others, past a certain point, the excess is simply waste. This is the basis for a numbers of Warrior's Rules, most importantly those for minimization action (5.4 Minimizing Action).

Sun Tzu taught that properties emerge from the complex interactions of parts to create positions that are greater than the sum of their parts. In science, this characteristic is known as emergence. As single atom of water is not wet. Wetness emerges as a property of water only when enough water is present. This philosophy is the basis for all of Sun Tzu's strategy (1.2.3 Position Complexity).

Warrior's Rules: 

Competitive Arenas: