The thing that bothers me about evolutionary biologists is that it's turtles all the way down (a very handy phrase to use at cocktail parties, btw). Their explanations are plausible and sometimes useful but as the saying goes the plural of anecdote is not data.

Believers in the free market suffer a similar problem. True believers often paint themselves into a corner by saying that all market situations are optimal or soon will be. This is nonsense. Market behavior is often worse than the optimal situation as any good socialist will tell you - after all the average corporate profit margin is 5% so the product could be sold at least 5% cheaper!

I'm generally sympathetic to the market-knows-best viewpoint but people are involved (on both the buying and selling ends) so the results are frequently crap. The best rebuttal to the government-knows-best line is that people are still involved on the government end but have magnified powers to screw things up. And being people they do.

A much harder argument than free markets for efficiencies' sake is liberty for liberty's sake. Liberty is not intrinsically desirable as one billion Chinamen will tell you (Also dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature). Because it is a harder argument than "government will do it worse" people, including me, make the liberty argument last even when it should be first. Arguing for results is always easier than arguing for principals when most people have no principals and simply desire results.