A fallacy is defined as a mistaken belief or a failure in reasoning. Though most people try to avoid mistakes, no one is infallible, not even those who act like they are.

You can download a chart of common fallacies here. The online chart is hyperlinked to each of the fallacies.

I break fallacies into two major groups:

First, we have traditional fallacies you might remember from philosophy 101. In these, the reasoning is obviously absurd, though we might be at a loss to explain the specific violation involved:

As mortgage rates have risen this year, the buyer demand for homes has fallen. That has spelled trouble for the home construction business. Homebuilder confidence dropped for the tenth straight month in October. The decline in builder sentiment reflects what economist Ian Shepherdson describes as “housing … in free fall.

Not Thinking like a Liberal
by Raymond Geuss, Harvard, 2022
xiv + 197 pp.

Almost eighty years ago, economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek published what is now considered to be one of the most important essays in all of economics, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In it, he detailed what is known as “the knowledge problem,” which he describes as, “a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know.”

A house of cards. A sandcastle. Dominoes. Lots of imagery available to describe our global, socialist economic system. Waiting for a crisis is one thing, considering a way out is another. Watching news from other countries provides signs of things to come which helps diagnose the worldwide problem. From CNBC:

There’s an idea rooted among some libertarians that the Federal Reserve was originally a sound institution but has grown corrupt. As a bankers’ bank, it was fine, they believe, but not as the monster it has grown to be. If we could only go back to the Fed’s founding charter, all would be well.