On the other hand

The government has a hand in everybody's business and another in every person's pocket. By limiting such governmental pickpocketing, we can limit its incursions on our freedom.

—an example of a reification fallacy

Mr. Skeptic: Why don't governments have hands?

Mr. Normal: Duh. Can't you see they don't have hands? Look around. You won't see an actual hand attached to any government.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but I'm told most people have hands, and yet I've seen and will see only a small percentage of the fourteen billion or so hands in the world. So I'm unsure that saying I won't see it is a sufficient reason for my believing it doesn't exist.

Mr. Normal: Oh, come on, stop being pedantic. The difference between the hand of government and the hands of a person you've never met is that you could see the person's hands, presumably by meeting that person and asking them to take their gloves off if they're wearing them. Whereas, governments don't have a physical body and therefore don't have a physical hand.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, I agree governments don't have physical hands, but that doesn't answer my question as to why they don't have hands. Maybe it's more evocative to ask the compliment question: Why do people have hands?

Mr. Normal: Because they're born with them, obviously.

Mr. Skeptic: OK. What about people who lost a hand and now have a prosthetic hook instead? Do hooks count as hands?

Mr. Normal: No, hooks are definitely not hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So some people are missing a hand?

Mr. Normal: Yes, some people are missing a hand.

Mr. Skeptic: What about people who lost their hand and have successfully undergone hand transplant surgery? Do transplanted hands count as hands?

Mr. Normal: Yes, of course, just as transplanted livers count as livers.

Mr. Skeptic: OK, then what about Luke Skywalker? Is his prosthetic hand a real hand? Or is it just a hand-like thing? I mean, it's a lot more hand-like than a hook, but it's a lot less hand-like than a transplanted hand, too.

Mr. Normal: I think Luke Skywalker's prosthetic hand counts as a real hand.

Mr. Skeptic: So if Luke Skywalker and I met, and we greeted in the custom of modern Western Civilization, you would say we were shaking hands, not shaking one hand and one hand-like prosthetic?

Mr. Normal: Well, you could say either, though it would be more polite and to the point to call it shaking hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So exactly how hand-like must a prosthetic be before it counts as a real hand? How unlike a hand may it be before it stops counting as a real hand?

Mr. Normal: Look, stop trying to make this into a problem of demarcation by forcing me to arbitrate the definition of the word hand. People have hands; governments don't. In order for a person to have a hand, their arm must terminate in a sufficiently hand-like thing. Presumably that means the thing has a palm and some fingers and is able to do hand-like actions with it, like grasping objects and shaking hands with other people. Maybe the exact definition of hand wiggles a bit, but I'm not going to make this a matter of arbitrary definition.

Mr. Skeptic: Hmm… I'm unclear about these other words you use: arm, palm, and finger. Can you define them for me?

Mr. Normal: You're missing the point. Hands must be tangible, physical things. They must attach to an arm and be sufficiently hand-like. That's it. It's not rocket science.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but the hand of government is hand-like insofar as it's used to—or so I'm told—pickpocket people. Why doesn't that count? And as for tangible physicality, one hand of the U.S. government may be presumed to be the IRS, which is a real, physical thing—or at least, they've got a lot of brick-and-mortar locations and they're made up, among other things, of real hands, which you yourself admit are real. As for the arm of government, we could say that's the Department of the Treasury. So it seems the hand of government meets your criteria for being a real hand.

Mr. Normal: What is wrong with you? Only by loose metaphor does a government have hands and arms. Whereas people have real, non-metaphorical hands.

Mr. Skeptic: Except for Luke Skywalker, of course.

Mr. Normal: No, we agreed that Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is sufficiently hand-like. There's no loose metaphor going on there.

Mr. Skeptic: But what makes Luke Skywalker's prosthetic sufficiently hand-like and the hand of government insufficiently hand-like?

Mr. Normal: Look, Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is like a real, natural human hand. It looks like a human hand, and it functions like a human hand. The metaphor that allows us to say the prosthetic is indeed a hand is a tight metaphor. You wouldn't know Luke's hand was a prosthetic without seeing the original hand lightsabered off or the prosthetic being attached. Whereas, the hand of government is a loose metaphor. That hand functions as a hand only symbolically.

Mr. Skeptic: So it's the tightness of the metaphor that counts?

Mr. Normal: Yes, exactly.

Mr. Skeptic: So then how tight does the metaphor need to be? And how do we measure the tightness of a metaphor?

Mr. Normal: Gaah! You measure it by seeing how similar the presumed hand is to an actual, real human hand.

Mr. Skeptic: And by real human hand you mean the kind of hand a person is born with.

Mr. Normal: Exactly. Finally, you're getting it.

Mr. Skeptic: No, I'm not getting it. It sounds like you're saying people have hands and governments don't have hands because people are born with hands and governments aren't born with hands. That's just shifting one arbitrary definition to another, from the hands we have now to the hands we were born with. It's begging the question. Why then is it appropriate to call the arm termini that humans are born with hands but not the arm termini that governments are born with?

Mr. Normal: Look, it is arbitrary. The word hand is just a label we apply to something, and it's something that (most) humans are born with—two of them, in fact—and that governments don't have. The end. We could have picked different words to use, like say humans are born not with hands but instead with flands, and tax-collecting agencies in government are hands. And instead of pickpocketing, what thieves do is called blickblocketing and pickpocketing is what governments do when they collect taxes. What's the big deal what we call these things? The important thing is that people, like you and me, have these things that by convention we call hands. And some people pickpocket with their hands. But despite whatever differences there are in the size, shape, color, and ability of people's hands, those hands are all very similar, and it makes sense to lump them into a single category, which we call hands. Any hand of government will be sufficiently dissimilar to human hands to warrant not being in that category. The end.

Mr. Skeptic: But who decides how similar two things need to be in order for them to count as being in a group, and how dissimilar two things need to be for them not to count as being in a group?

Mr. Normal: Convention decides it.