The Thrusts and Parries of Policy Arguments

Anyone who has ever put forward a policy proposal has heard the response, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But despite the ubiquity of this attack on policy proposals, there has been little sustained inquiry into how the attack works and how it can be defended. The goal of this Article is to identify policy attacks like this, and to show their underlying logical structure, and how they function to attack policy proposals. The Article demonstrates this approach by considering three generic attacks on policy proposals, which I refer to as ain’t broke attacks, partial framing attacks, and dollar in the street attacks. But these are just three particular ways that policy proposals can be attacked. To capture a broader set of policy attacks, the Article puts forward a general model of policy proposals, and the premises that they rely on. Since all policy proposals rely on these premises, all policy proposals can be undermined by rebutting these premises. The Article demonstrates the application of these attacks on three particular kinds of policy proposals: cost-benefit policy proposals, proposals for mandatory arrangements, and, what I refer to as Goldilocks proposals.

By showing the thrusts and parries by which policy arguments can be attacked and defended, the Article aims to improve policy arguments. Modeling the structure of policy arguments abstracted from their particular contexts allows us to analyze them more deeply, and to amplify the benefits of that analysis for a broader set of applications. Identifying and labeling potential attacks on policy proposals facilitates responses to those proposals by others, and also allows authors to better defend against such attacks. Better policy arguments, both for and against, mean better policy debates, and therefore, better policy.