Proving too much

• The Georgia-born American educator Henry Coppée in 1850 described in his "Elements of Rhetoric" that if one argues that slavery is evil because masters are put into situations where they can beat slaves to death, then marriage and parenthood are also evil because domestic violence exists.
• Economist Walter Block states that the argument "because perfect competition does not exist in a free market, government must intervene," proves too much. "It argues, in effect, that 1) reality does not resemble an arbitrarily contrived model of the world; 2) reality should resemble this model; and therefore 3) the government should step in, to bring the world into closer conformity with the model. But almost anything can be 'proven' with this line of reasoning. Substitute for perfect competition objects moving faster than the speed of light, or people having more than two arms, and further government intervention can easily be justified. Even were it true, however, that the market is somehow deficient because the pinnacle of perfect competition has not been attained, it by no means follows that further state encroachments on the economy would improve matters."