| | "People who don't believe in the free market are idiots, pure and simple, and I don't apologize for calling them as such."
Leaving out the possibility of the mis-informed, confused, brainwashed, or budding Objectivist? That makes Linz-the-former-Commie a reformed idiot? And I was an idiot before I figured this stuff out? Is idiocy volitional or genetic? Human beings are not computers. It takes people some time to 'spiral' with ideas and really integrate them.
That said, I can understand your exasperation. I still remember with some distaste my arguments with Marxists on campus at college. They preferred to mock the 'invisible hand' and ascribe it to Republican mysticism, rather than understanding that it is just a cognitive tool to describe a self correcting market. The facts were right there, but they preferred, like a pack of jackals, to remain in the group and evade. I just don't know whether calling people idiots in a blanket sort of way is fair, accurate, or effective. Its the sort of thing Marxists do. It can be emotionally satisfying, though. And it MAY be accurate of some of them.
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Only an idiot – someone utterly ignorant of basic principles of economics, and of the morality of free-market capitalism – would decry business profits or would think that “price-gouging” is a bad thing. 
