Economic Fallacies I’m Sick of Hearing
“Capitalism”
A word coined by Socialists in the 19th century to disparage owners of “capital” which is a word that just means “stuff I think I can take from other people for the common good”.
No two people who ever use that word mean the same thing. Proponents of free trade need to stop making the mistake of using this word because when people who are against voluntary interaction hear it they just hear “evil bad exploitation”.
“Fair Share”
Concept meant to imply the target group ( always someone richer than the speaker ) must be extorted some more otherwise it’s not “fair” as if “fairness” was some objective measure. Over half of people receive more in transfer payments than they pay. How is that “fair”? You know those people? You individually checked that all of them just can’t work more to pay a “fair” share of the price of services for society or something?
When you go grocery shopping, do they look up your tax return to see what your “fair” price for eggs and milk should be? What’s that? No? Because the price of a service has nothing to do with the wealth of the person getting that service?
”Fair” just means “whatever they pay now, plus a little bit more” until the next election cycle where the brain surgeons in the media will discover once again that the “Fair share” has increased some more!
“They’re just greedy /selfish”
And you aren’t? Typically used by a person who thinks it’s generous to give away other people’s money. The implication of course being that if I call someone else greedy, that makes me NOT greedy somehow, even though I want to tell other people how they MUST spend THEIR money for MY projects and goals. Here it’s implied that the speaker’s goals are “what everyone should want” and not wanting that is a character flaw that invalidates the speaker’s right to retain their property.
”Living Wage”
Nobody using that terms ever defines it or makes any attempt to explain what it’s based on other then an arbitrary level of material comfort which they feel entitled to receive. What’s a “living wage” for a 95 year old with stage 4 cancer, exactly? Everyone dies at some point, does that mean nobody ever earned a living wage? Or is a living wage just the number of calories you need for a day, measured in canola oil?
I can’t believe this buzzword works on people.
”Basic Human Right”
You don’t have any rights to things others must provide. If you’re alone on a desert Island, that’s your rights. You don’t have a right to healthcare, food, water, medicine, television, cellphones, shelter or whatever else would make your life better.
The category of “human right” expands as the base society gets wealthier and tech advances. Now the internet is considered a human right by some. Oh that thing that basically didn’t become useful until the 1990s was a “basic human right all along”?
Someone should have told the Pharaohs and the Ming Dynasty about that, damn!
”Money Hoarding”
This one shows how little people understand the finances of rich people and just how money works in general. First of all, rich people don’t hoard money, they invest it. Second of all, even if you did hoard cash, that’s functionally the same as burying it in the ground or burning it. How is anyone but the rich person hurt if they just take a million dollars and set it on fire?
Of course what makes people made isn’t the “hoarding” it’s the “not giving it away to things I like” aspect.
”Social Contract”
One of the goofiest arguments for the legitimacy of ruling classes. Here apparently we all signed some kind of contract before being born that now morally forces us to pay taxes or obey laws in some geographic location. The lunacy of this argument is made clear when you consider that you could have been born in Somalia or North Korea. Hey, nothing wrong with North Korea, it’s just the social contract that those people signed by being born there and not escaping.
What’s the counter to this? That social contracts with bad outcomes are invalid? Well US citizens of Japanese ancestry were put into camps during WW2, does that mean people with Japanese ancestry don’t need to follow the laws in the USA anymore?
At this point the “social contract” defender is forced to once again retreat to the default “My morality is universal and obvious so whatever I say is what everyone needs to do” mindset so they can criticize whatever government abuse they like in their own country while also telling others to “pay their fair shares” and their “living wages” because of “muh social contract”.
”Price Gouging / Excess Profits / Exploitation”
There’s a whole family of this type of buzzword where the person using them makes the case that a thing just costs TOO MUCH more then some arbitrary price point that it “should cost”. The only time “gouging” happens is under state-protected industries. Those stories about the 10 000$ toilet seats and 300k hospital bills from the USA all come from industries with made up prices where the state has a complete chokehold on what anyone can buy or sell.
But other times people just complain that a price of a certain thing is “gouging” because they just don’t want to pay it ( high rent in coastal cities ) or because it’s a thing that used to retail for less ( tickets flipped by scalpers for instance ).
Similar to the “they’re greedy!” argument, the complainer using these terms of course never considers their own behavior to be gouging or exploitative. Nobody ever says that they charge too much for their labor. Nobody takes the voluntary paycut for doing next to nothing at their job, instead proudly bragging about taking dumps on company time.
”Landlords Do Nothing”
This is a common trope where the idea is you should own one house / apartment and NO MORE because then you’re “hoarding it” and “exploiting renters”. This is often combined with people’s misconceived notion that owning is financially strictly better the renting because renting is “paying someone else’s mortgage instead of your own!!!”.
Of course that’s already priced into the market. Renting is cheaper than mortgages and if you invest the difference in index funds, you’ll come out ahead. That’s just reflecting that people pay a premium to live in a place their own instead of being tenants. There’s no “secret” homeowner loophole but politicians constantly prey on people’s desire to own to make them think that there’s just no economic downsides to it and they’re being exploited by landlords and evil bankers are colluding with rich people to not hand out loans that would get you out of this “rental poverty trap”.
”Externalities”
This term is used by economists to rationalize any and all random government intervention. It’s pseudo-scientific jargon that essentially legitimizes the practice of putting a dollar amount on some unpriced cost incurred by others when you do something.
The typical example being pollution. If my factory produces something and shoots soot into the air, I’m not paying for that, therefore this is a “negative externality” and therefore we can now tax my factory.
First of all, that’s a complete non sequitur.
Second of all, who decides what is a negative externality and what it’s worth?
Third: Everything has negative and positive externalities. Me farting in an elevator causes the negative externality of bad smells to others. What’s that worth? By the logic employed by economists, I need a fart tax to be distributed to others because I just got away with my evil negative externality.
I’ve never seen anyone come up with a counter to this, they just play the same old game of “No my morality is universal and obvious so I will tell you what the true ones are and all your other examples are stupid and bad and trollling reeeeee don’t you know I subscribe to TheGuardian???”.
“Monopoly”
Once again a completely arbitrarily defined random market share of a random good or service that is used as a rationale for why we need government to go mess with people. The entire theory is nonsensical because people’s solution to monopolies is to grant the government a monopoly on the military, the police, the courts, healthcare, money circulation etc.
Monopolies are also arbitrarily defined by geography and industry.
So for instance there’s no “Global transportation monopoly” but there is a “Railroad monopoly in Germany”.
You can always say something is a monopoly if you just restrict the location and type of industry enough. One modern example being DeBeers who have a diamond monopoly. Who cares? Diamond aren’t essential to life on earth.
“Public Servant”
A high level coping mechanism that people use to label politicians and their lackeys so they can pretend that the people making the laws and taking the decisions are really the “servants” and the people who do nothing but pay taxes and obey are the “masters”.
“Public Good”
Another coping mechanism where the person misunderstands what “property” or “ownership” entails and believe themselves to be part-owners of whatever the government owns.
It’s something you tell simpletons when you’re a dictator. “I know I’m the one living in the palace but it’s OUR palace! Yes there’s armed security preventing you from entering OUR palace but don’t worry! It’s definitely OURS! We have equal share of this palace! Aren’t you glad it’s not owned by some evil rich bastard!”.
“Multiplier”
This a fancy buzzword that just means “return on investment”. Governments use these to pretend that its spending MAKES people money instead of wasting it.
The entire premise being that for some reason private investors are too stupid to make these investments themselves. You’ll often hear of these plans when cities want to build new sports facilities for instance, boasting about the economic impact on the local restaurants and the increased tax revenues from tourists and so on.
If it’s that great of an investment, why aren’t banks doing it? You see here this goes against the previous ideas of “exploitation” and “greed” that government defenders tend to invoke to chastise businesses. Now they’re not greedy anymore, they hate money and that’s why we need to invest in that sport stadium, for the awesome “multiplier” effect it will have on our tax spending! Wow! For sure not a scam.
“Creating Jobs”
This one really pisses me off because it’s used by politicians to trick people into thinking wealth transfers are the same as economic growth. If you pay 500 people to dig a hole and 500 others to fill it back in, you’ve created 1000 jobs but decreased wealth. Wealth creation is the only metric that matters.
The dumbest example of this metric is when they brag about high employment during war time. Wow good job you’re breaking the economy’s back at gunpoint to fund a huge war machine that does nothing but blow up what other people built with the added bonus of murdering people on both sides. Genius.
It’s time to retire the “creating jobs” buzzword. I don’t want a job, I want STUFF.
Anyway that’s enough for now.