It seems that the major fallacy is other people's theories. Mason Gaffney may be sarcastic but he is also correct. Thus Knight writes under the heading "The Major Fallacy of the Political Economists": "Pivotal, as the fountainhead of analytical fallacy, was an apparent mental fixation on labor as alone really productive.", "Economic History", in P. Wiener (ed.), The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 1973-4, vol. 2, p. 48 Ludwig von Mises writes (Human Action: A Treatise On Economics, 1963 [1949], pp. 203-4): An inveterate fallacy asserted that things and services exchanged are of equal value. Value was considered as objective, as an intrinsic quality inherent in things and not merely as the expression of various people's eagerness to acquire them. People, it was assumed, first established the magnitude of value proper to goods and services by an act of measurement and then proceeded to barter them against quantities of goods and services of the same amount of value. This fallacy frustrated Aristotle's approach to economic problems and, for almost two thousand years, the reasoning of all those for whom Aristotle's opinions were authoritative. It seriously vitiated the marvelous achievements of the classical economists and rendered the writings of their epigones, especially those of Marx and the Marxian school, entirely futile. The basis of modern economics is the cognition that it is precisely the disparity in the value attached to the objects exchanged that results in their being exchanged. Of course, it is quite reasonable, that scientists should expose fallacies. Most arguments are based on that. If you do your searches you can find the concept very early in economics. [E.g., in the mercantilists (Misselden in Free Trade, Dudley North "All which is a profound Fallacy, and hath been a Remora, whereby the growing Wealth of many Countries have been obstructed" in Discourses, etc.). I googled on Rod Hay's site]. Indeed the sweet and always well meaning J.S. Mill asserts that being open t o accept your fallacy is the only way forward (On Liberty, ch ii): "The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this." The question is rather, do we reject other theories for truly "internal" reasons, or do we masquerade political arguments as "logical fallacies"? Nicholas J. Theocarakis