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
1) That booms and busts happen more violently under freer markets and we need regulation to smooth this out.
2) 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 market is a process." - Ludwig von Mises, as related by Israel Kirzner. "Capital formation is a beautiful thing" - Chloe732.
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
enjoy
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.—Karl Kraus.
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.
"Man thinks not only for the sake of thinking, but also in order to act."-Ludwig von Mises
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.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
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"?
Government Explained 2: The Special Piece of Paper
Law without Government
My biggest pet peeve is the statists double-sided coin: statism=order and anarchy=chaos.
http://pauliecannoli.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/anarchy-cartoon.jpg
>>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.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
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."
</rant>
Clayton -
Continuing on the theme of double standards, it is outrageous that so many people still believe that the organization called the State is a source for good in the world despite how many deaths (not to mention destruction to property, emotional pain and lost economic opportunities) are directly attributable to State activities. For example: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM.
Those same people also believe that the free market is a source of evil in the world despite the fact that most people, including the ones killed by the State, would never have existed in the first place had it not been for free markets.
And when you point out these facts to them the look in their eyes is one of impervious disregard!
Daniel Muffinburg - "... That Ron Paul is a neo-liberal. "
Please clarify. Why is this a peeve? Is it because he is not an anarcho-Capitalist? By "neo-liberal", do you mean he supports limited government as opposed to no government?
Yeah, I wasn't clear. My pet peeve is that many lefties call Ron Paul a neo-liberal.
The state can be reformed!
Daniel Muffinburg - "...neo-liberal..."
Now I understand what you are getting at...after reading their definition of "neo-liberal", where to I go to vomit?
Neoliberalism, to the best of my knowledge, is a softcore version of neoconservatism marketed in political economies where pro-US foreign policies are not looked upon kindly, and with a touch of bastardized Chicago school economics. It also has a strong tendency towards centralisation and globalism for the purposes of benefiting favoured multinationals. It is opposed to both protectionism and free trade, preaching "global governance" of international markets as the key to prosperity in the third world.
There is a neoliberal party in my country, one of whose main members, an economist (ironically, formerly of the social-democrat party) who helped liberalize the country into being consistently ranked near the top in most indexes of both economic and political freedom, was recently caught out, along with several other legislators, using his position to get extravagant travel expenses paid off. It's leader has become particularily well known in my city due to his plan to bring the city, which is currently divided into borough-like subdivisions with their own mayors, councils and bylaws, into a singular supercity, with much of the decision making (well, even more) being made by unelected advisors rather than elected officials.
Annoying thing #2: The way people look at enron, the bildeberg group, the fed, blackwater, etc. and all claim that they are free market and need more government regulation!
Annoying thing #3: The way people get all teary-eyed and patriotic during national holidays celebrating our "freedoms". It's like, "hello, haven't you noticed 'our freedoms' today are half as much as 'our freedoms' yesterday?" Of course you can never say this out of fear of offending people plus, it would mark you as a "liberal" or an "america-hater" -certainly not the land of the logical or the home of the prudent.
Anyone employed in a third world factory is a slave.
"Anyone employed in a third world factory is a slave."
How so?
I think he's saying that that's his pet peeve.
Invariably followed by: "We just need to elect the right people!"