Thread by @anilsaidso

Taken from ‘Economic Facts and Fallacies’ by @ThomasSowell, the Open-Ended Fallacy lays out the dangers of causes, movements and campaigns whose advocates disregard the limited nature of time and resources or the reality of trade-offs.

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1/ “Who could be against health, safety, or open space?

But each of these things is open-ended, while resources are not only limited but have alternative uses which are also valuable.”

2/ “No matter how much is done to promote health, more could be done. No matter how safe things have been made, they could be made safer. And no matter how much open space there is, there could be still more.”

3/ “there are advocates, movements, laws, and policies promoting an open-ended commitment to more of each of these things, without any indication of a limit, or any principle by which a limit might be set, much less any consideration of alternative uses of the resources..”

4/ “Health is certainly something desirable and most people are happy to see billions of dollars devoted to cancer research. But would anyone want to devote half the national income to wiping out skin rashes?”

5/ “Crime control is certainly desirable but would anyone want to devote half the national income to wiping out the last vestige of shoplifting?”

6/ “While no one would advocate these particular trade-offs, what open-ended demands for open space, crime control, better health or cleaner air and water do advocate leaves out the very concept of trade-offs.”

7/ “That is what makes such demands open-ended, both as regards the amounts of money required and often also the amounts of restrictions on people’s freedom required to enforce these demands.”

8/ “Open-ended demands are a mandate for ever-expanding government bureaucracies with ever-expanding budgets and powers. Unlimited extrapolations constitute a special variation on the open-ended fallacy.”

9/ “Much bitter opposition to the building of homes, highways, or even water and sewage systems is based on the belief that these will just attract more people, more traffic and more urbanization..”

10/ “not only is there no unlimited supply of people, every person who moves from one place to another reduces the crowding in the place left while increasing crowding in the place that is the destination—with no net change in the amount of crowding in the society as a whole.”

11/ “Many beliefs which collapse under scrutiny may nevertheless persist indefinitely when they are not scrutinized, and especially when skilled advocates are able to perpetuate those beliefs by forestalling scrutiny through appeals to emotions or interests.”

END/ “Some popular fallacies of today are centuries old and were refuted centuries ago, even if they are repackaged in up-to-date rhetoric to suit current times.”