[Luxoris]

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You're missing the point, and making mine for me. It's often claimed in these debates that the forces of rationality will restrain people and companies from doing undesirable things and keep a lid on chaos, fraud, and predation.

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But nobody, even if they make these claims, claims that it will be 100% effective.

If anecdotal evidence is your "ZOMG GOTCHA" here, then you must agree that statism is a huge failure since every iteration of it has tried to stop murderers, and none has every succeeded. Ditto for theft. And fraud. And predation. And we don't even have to get into the cases where the state itself engages in those practices.

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Apart from that you're missing the broader point relevant to this thread that action and preference can be incongruous with the actions that a person would undertake with a clear head and proper information.

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But who is disputing this?

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Lol. Economics attempts to form theories on how to achieve the greatest common good. If you don't dispute that mistakes are made due to lack of information, mistakes in an individual's self-assesment of utility and/or irrational actions then you are admitting that economic policy cannot be accurately based solely on "revealed preferences", yet that is a basic tenet of Austrian economics. In fact von Mises goes so far as to reject indifference as being possible, which Caplan thorougly dismantles.