Argu177 [shining sep作文组] 8.18

Ajax555UID: 2241288

TOPIC: ARGUMENT177 - The following is a letter that recently appeared in the Oak City Gazette, a local newspaper.

"Membership in Oak City's Civic Club-a club whose primary objective is to discuss local issues-should continue to be restricted to people who live in Oak City. People who work in Oak City but who live elsewhere cannot truly understand the business and politics of the city. It is important to restrict membership to city residents because only residents pay city taxes and therefore only residents understand how the money could best be used to improve the city. At any rate, restricting membership in this way is unlikely to disappoint many of the nonresidents employed in Oak City, since neighboring Elm City's Civic Club has always had an open membership policy, and only twenty-five nonresidents have joined Elm City's Club in the last ten years."
WORDS: 487          TIME: 0:52:58          DATE: 2006-8-18

In this argument, the arguer concludes that membership in Oak City's Civic Club should continue to be restricted to people who live in Oak City. To support the conclusion, the arguer points out that only residents pay city taxes and therefore only residents understand how the money could best be used to improve the city. In addition, the arguer reasons that since neighboring Elm City's Civic Club has always had an open membership policy, and only twenty-five nonresidents have joined Elm City's Club in the last ten years. This argument suffers from several critical fallacies.

In the first place, the argument is based on a false precondition. The arguer cursorily assumes that only residents pay city taxes and therefore only residents are concerned about the development of Oak City, but he does not provide any evidence that foreign citizens who do not pay city taxes do not care about the development of Oak City. On the contrary, the better Oak City develops, the more the workers can earn. To improve their salaries, the foreign workers would be willing to pay attention on developing Oak City.

Furthermore, it is untenable to assert that only residents only understand how the money could best be used to improve the city. Nonresidents also understand how to construct the city, even better than residents. The nonresidents who just work in Oak City come from different other cities. They can give a lot of good advices of improving the city, which have been accepted in other cities. And they could bring many new concepts and method to Oak City. So restricting membership is an improper suggestion.

Secondly, the evidence proving restricting membership is unlikely to disappoint many of the nonresidents employed in Oak City is not strong enough. No evidence indicates that there is any common place between Elm City and Oak City, therefore comparing Elm City with Oak City is inappropriate. The fact that only twenty-five nonresidents have joined Elm City's Club in the last ten years can not demonstrate restricting membership would not disappoint nonresidents. And the arguer can not assure that the reason why just twenty-five nonresidents joined Elm City is just the nonresidents are careless about Elm City. Maybe there are other reasons. For example, the nonresident in Elm City is just very few. Or Elm City is a small city, so few people care about the policy and economy. Hence, this case of Elm City is not suitable for proving arguer's point.

To sum up, the conclusion lacks credibility because the evidence cited in the analysis does not lend strong support to what the arguer maintains. To strengthen the argument, the arguer would have to provide more evidence concerning the percentage of the nonresidents who do not care about improving Oak City. To better evaluate the argument, the argument would need more membership information of other cities' civic club to prove restrict membership to city residents is important.