Am I the only one who gets this all the time from people? "Oh you mean no government? That's crazy and extreme. It's important to be balanced." I'm sure I'm not the only one who's gotten the "balance" thing, but it strikes me every time as horribly lazy thinking. No matter what it is, "somewhere in the middle is about right, cause that way we're sure we have some amount of balance."
What does that even mean?
Ask these people what "balance" would've meant in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia or Mao's China. "Let's not kill all the Jews... just 1/3 of them."
Political Atheists Blog
No, don't use krazy kaju's radical rhetoric - Godwin's law and all that. Say something simpler:
"The truth is not a halfway point between two untruths."
"There is no known arbitrary point according to which an ineffient policy becomes excessive, too little, and just right, and there is no relevant argument in saying that we need just the right amount of an inefficient policy."
"No government is not the same thing as no institutions of order - English common law precedes the existence of many governments today, and was developed from an older tradition of law gradually created by merchants, guildsmen, local magistrates, and chief arbiters in towns and villages. Let's not confuse modern day style government with all forms of known order."
Oh, c'mon Prateek, you're robbing him of all of the fun of debate.
That's really the only way to do it. Everyone repeats that politics is about compromise, but you can't understand anything unless you go to the extreme circumstance. To statists, 'balance' means that you can tell me what to do half the time, and I'll tell you what to do the other half, but libertarians just believe in a balance whereby everyone is happy on their own without getting involved in other people's business.
In schools, we're taught balance is never getting on anyone's nerves. Freedom from annoyance, basically.
I've generally gone with something like, "Wait what? You think the world would be a better place if there were NO murders? What an extremist. Balance is important, you know..."
Golden mean fallacy.
Why anarchy fails
I'm glad there's a formal name for the fallacy. I've long been annoyed with this kind of retort. It's an easy way for people to avoid thinking about an issue, falling back on the conventional wisdom that moderation is a useful guide.
On this particular issue, it's important to point out the substantive differences between state intervention and spontaneous order. People are likely to be lazy and reason, "Full regulation would be bad, as would no regulation, so the optimal situation is one in which there is a certain amount of state regulation." But the problem is not with the amount of state regulation, but with regulation itself.