David Bergland on the reification fallacy

"Reification" is a fancy word for treating a concept or a label as something that actually exists.  The fallacy is in forgetting that the concept or label doesn't really exist, only people do.  "Government," for instance, does not exist as a thing separate from the people who make it up.  Certainly it is necessary to have a term like "government," just as we have terms like church, school, army, union, corporation, family and so on.  But, none of these labels (groups) has an existence apart from and greater than the individuals in it.

Whenever you hear someone discussing what the government, or the bureaucrats, or the big corporations, or the unions did, always ask, "Which individuals did what things?"  Only individuals can act and they should, of course, be responsible for their actions.

One purpose for engaging in this fallacy is to depersonalize people you want to mistreat.  It is much easier to call for heavy taxation of "the big corporations" than to call for reducing the dividends of the pensioners, widows, and orphans who depend on pension funds which own shares in many big corporations.  Another purpose is to argue that you, an individual, are less important than labels such as "society," so you should sacrifice your interests.

~ David Bergland, Libertarianism in One Lesson, pp. 9-10