Pat Gunning asked: > how prominent economists have used the > term fallacy. What have they regarded as fallacies? "Why protection retains such popular strength in spite of all exposures of its fallacies" (p. v) Henry George, Protection or Free Trade, 1883. The concept of the pure free market, and the fallacy that trade barriers are beneficial, goes back at least to the Physiocrats, who espoused laissez faire. To them, free trade required the abolition of taxation other than the impot unique, a tax on the "net product" which we today call the "economic rent" of land. Henry George added a moral dimension to the concept of a free market, arguing that not only does the taxation of wages and other interventions have an excess burden, but that it is morally wrong to tax labor and otherwise interfere with free trade. I suspect today's libertarian opposition to taxation originates with Henry George's works, even while ironically today's libertarians are mostly opposed to his ideas. Previous 19th-century anarchists such as Lysander Spooner had moral arguments against imposed government. But their economic arguments were limited in not confronting the land issue. Spooner, hower, did use England as an example of a realm that was financed from land rents. Thus, the concept of the pure free market, and the corollary, the fallacy of market failure, and its relationship to the land issue, does indeed invoke the history of economic thought. Fred Foldvary