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Notes -
I have my doubts about Caplan's framing, mainly because I consider my self an "economically literate" left-leaning person, and I think markets are great at a bunch of things, but I'm also aware of famous market failures where government intervention was useful.
Bank runs are a good example of a market failure that I think the central government is well-equipped to fix with things like FDIC insurance. I'm aware of proposals by committed, principled libertarians for how we could solve bank runs through market mechanisms, but I also think that when something like FDIC insurance has worked reasonably well for the last 90+ years, it seems silly to abandon a form of government intervention that works just because there's some fancy mechanism design that accomplishes the same thing through market means.
I think a lot of market fundamentalists are guilty of "infinite frictionless plane" or "spherical cow" type reasoning. Yes, in a society of rational agents, with perfect information, no transaction costs, and perfect ability to insure against negative externalities, we can arrive at Pareto efficient outcomes through market mechanisms. But that seems to ignore that humans aren't rational agents, we don't have perfect information, there often are transaction costs, and we don't have insurance for all possible negative externalities.
We should use markets where they're empirically known to work, and use government intervention where markets empirically veer the furthest from realizing the ideal models used by economists. I'm okay with using government intervention to prop up and support the market, if it gets us closer to the economist's utopia of Pareto efficient outcomes, since even that sounds like it would be an improvement upon the world where we actually live as far as distribution of resources goes.
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