Whether it be long-repressed urges to yell “minimum-wages don’t work!” or the schadenfreude of watching stock-market malivestments be liquidated, you can come here and express your most deep-seated pet-peeves of popular economic thinking.
Come my friends, and find sanity, I’m listening.
One thing that I find incredibly frustrating is most people’s bizarre, baseless assumption that there’s just no way that a free market in education could ever conceivably work. Again and again people tell me that without socialized education there will be no education. Why? I ask. Because it’s expensive, they say. Markets lower prices, I point out. Never heard a counterargument yet. Never persuaded anyone either.
THE ROOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDSSSSSSS!
…
In all seriousness, what kinda makes me the most angry is this a priori assumption that free and voluntary economic transactions are somehow “exploitative”. Or that there is some objective “fair wage” that the government can set.
I get sick of all the brain-numbing cliches about how this and that spending will “help the economy.” People who should otherwise be smarter will complain about how dumb it is to hire people to do really unproductive activities, then in the same breath will contradict their own sentiments by saying, “Oh well, at least the added jobs will help the economy.”
People who think economics is a hard science, and that graphs and equations make theories more ‘scientific.’
(What makes em scientific is if they explain something which is actually happening and then make falsifiable predictions, of course 
uh huh
That booms and busts happen more violently under freer markets and we need regulation to smooth this out.
Busts happen for “mysterious reasons” that we can’t quite figure out. Or it’s the animal spirits.
Sometimes its called “stimulus”, other times is called “deficit spending”. People think there is such a thing as “stimulus dollars”. Why not increase the deficit to $500 trillion per year? If stimulus works, then let’s get serious about it and make everyone rich…/sarcasm.
The stock market goes up and down due to today’s economic reports…
We must look at the latest government reports for guidance about how the economy is doing…
We must wait in hushed silence as the Fed makes its 2:15 pm eastern time announcement on “interest rate policy”…shhhh…
A Fed head is speaking at some rubber chicken luncheon somewhere…shhhh…listen carefully, parse every word…
Broken windows create jobs, repeat, broken windows create jobs, repeat…
My pet peeve is the seemingly ubiquitous belief that profit is somehow inherently unethical rather than a monetary measure of how well a person is serving other people.
economics is a branch of mathematics
Haha, one time, my fellow anarcho capitalist friend and I where arguing about the roads and the debate had pretty much deteriorated at this point so the roads where his last recourse. When asked who would build the roads, my friend stated ‘i will build the roads with the right incentives’ which was comical because he has a degree in civil engineering.
Fellow Miseseans I share the same frustrations that you do though if I would add my own, I would say that it always frustrated me that in general, people don’t believe the market is voluntary but that government is. This is because the free market involves (ironically) choice and with it, the possibility of a hard choice and the disutility of labor whereas the state -blessed be it -offers such convincingly scary threats that the cost of choosing to follow it is extremely low.It is this feeling of ease in submission that people call freedom and the effort of willing coercion. This can be severely depressing to the freedom-fighter who realizes that not only is it difficult to argue for anarchism, but also that 9/10 of the people who would people it, are unfit for liberty.
Government regulation is necessary.
Protectionism/Neo-Mercantilism. Basically, government needs to enact measures to save “our” jobs/industry. Ugh 
One that is currently bugging me is the idea that “energy independence” is some kind of virtue.
… That Ron Paul is a neo-liberal.
People who reject anarchy as “unrealistic” and “unacheivable”, and hence support a system of minimal government.
A world of zero rape is probably unrealistic and unacheivable. Is that a good reason to say “some rape is OK”?
My biggest pet peeve is the statists double-sided coin: statism=order and anarchy=chaos.
A world of zero rape is probably unrealistic and unacheivable. Is that a good reason to say “some rape is OK”?
its not just that they give the nod to some being ok, they want to institutionalise a definite amount of it.
Not necessarily a free market fallacy but related. Most frustrating to me is the seemingly bred-in acquiescence people have to bald-faced, blatant double-standards on the part of the government. In general, people find a blatant double-standard on the part of one of their peers enraging. Look at fights between siblings, in marriage or between employees for an inexhaustible fountain of examples (watch any sit-com of your choice, half the situations involve the adoption of a double-standard on the part of one character and its eventual annihilation by other characters.)
But when it comes to perceived/accepted authority figures, there is a maddening apathy that people suddenly adopt to double-standards. If you point out how when a police officer assaults someone, it should be treated as a crime and prosecuted with the same vigor that any private assault would be, people either go bananas and say you hate all cops or they just shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s life.” I would expect their reaction to be the same as if any other person had assaulted someone… at least simple moral disapproval. Why is it so hard for the average person to look at the immoral behavior of an authority figure and dispassionately say, “that is immoral.”
Clayton -
