Zero-sum thinking

A zero-sum game is a game in which the returns for both sides in any transaction is zero. For one party to win, another must lose an identical amount. Voluntary transactions are not zero sum, as for each party to agree to the trade they must have a net gain. Therefore, wealth is created from every transaction. Socialists tend to assume that there is instead a finite quantity of wealth in the universe, so that one party's wealth must cause another's poverty, a fallacious assumption as there is obviously more wealth now as there has ever been in the history of humanity.

Equating mercantilism to capitalism

Socialism and capitalism aren't the only economic systems to have been used in history. For millennia, the dominant economic thought used a system called mercantilism, which holds a few incorrect assumptions disproved initially by Adam Smith. The central tenet of mercantilism is that colonies should chiefly aid the mother country, so anytime a socialist blames capitalism for colonial imperialism they are mistaking it for mercantilism. As a side comment, the most commonly perpetuated relic of the defunct economic system is the equation of wealth with cash, leading to the mistaken notion that export is better than import, as cash (and therefore wealth) in is better than cash out, commonly used as justification for tariffs. Wealth is more than just cash, it factors in all assets and liabilities---basic finance.

Social contract

Statists often refer to a "social contract" as justification for redistribution and regulation, which conceptually refers to an agreement among the general public to abide by certain rules, as well as defining punishments for misbehavior. While the concept is similar to one posed in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, in which people, to avoid destroying each other, give power to the Sovereign (AKA the State) to keep them in line, the term "Social Contract" was invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The trouble is that nobody has signed, or even seen, anything resembling a unifying contract giving their rights to the State, and it would be totally unreasonable to consider a contract nobody signed to be binding.

Wage slavery

As an example of the evils of capitalism, socialists pull up scenarios in which employees must work at a particular job to survive, comparing it to slavery, defined as a job one cannot voluntarily leave. Since the laborer must work to fulfill basic needs, the employer must be oppressing him somehow. In fact, the only oppressor in voluntary transaction is nature. Hunger, poverty, illness, etc. are problems that have always existed as the default state of humanity, and are not the fault of any human being.

Natural monopolies

It's incredibly hard to form a monopoly. One has to fully control the distribution of a product with no close substitutes. For example, even if one owns every railroad in the United States, one still wouldn't have a monopoly since there are other forms of transportation one would be directly competing against. To go off another example, owning all telephone lines in a region isn't enough to charge monopoly prices, as there are other forms of communication like the Internet.

Even discounting substitutes, charging monopoly prices won't last under a free market, as more companies will immediately jump into the market to catch a share of the industry profit. To put it into perspective, the average profit margin for United States companies generally hovers around seven percent. Any industry producing a return substantially higher would result in a large infusion of capital from investors until the market hits equilibrium. To put it this way, if telecom companies were reaping in huge profits due to monopoly, any new startup in the field would easily draw enough equity to overcome any fixed costs associated with infrastructure to compete.

In fact, there are only a couple documented examples of natural monopolies existing in history: the New York Stock Exchange and African diamonds. Neither of them could still be considered natural monopolies anymore.

Most barriers of entry are regulatory in nature (think licensing and intellectual property laws) and those that aren't can be overcome by the infusion of capital from any savvy investors that see profit in the industry. I'd recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell for more in-depth examples.

Evil corporations

Socialists often assume corporations are the villains of society, exploiting nature, workers, etc. to get that cool profit. The common representation for companies are some faceless conglomerate owned by Mr. Moneybags himself, while most are publicly owned in reality, and since their fiduciary duty is to maximize return for their shareholders, means anyone, even their own employees can get a share of the profit.

A yuman right!

Politicians, most famously Bernie Sanders, who was the inspiration for this checkbox, like to declare commodities or services to be rights that must be provided by the State. This sentiment reflects a misunderstanding of both what rights are and where they come from, again codified by Rousseau. Rights are protections from outside interference---one's right to life means another cannot take another's life from them---not entitlements. One's right to liberty means they cannot be forced to provide anything to another. Rights, also, are "endowed by their Creator" as Jefferson put it---coming from within---rather than granted by other people, including the State. The distinction is important, since any right granted by men can be revoked by men while inherent rights are also immutable.

DAE LOLBERTARIAN???

Statists seem to think they're smarter than everyone else, and anyone who disagrees with them deserves ridicule.

The Greater Good^TM

In philosophical history, there has been a long-standing belief that if only people gave up their self-interest, and with it their individual rights, humanity would achieve greater heights than those possible with a free populace acting of their own accord with no central planning. Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, and even Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto all provide accounts of perfect societies free from strife achievable if only private property and individual liberty was abolished in favor of a higher vision. While totalitarianism is generally avoided as suggested policy, Statists still use similar language for incremental loss of freedom, with arguments of "If it only saves one life" as if the ends ever justify the means. History is rife with those with the best of intentions laying waste to their own societies in search of a better world, not worrying about the consequences until it's too late.

I used to be a libertarian

Some Statists assume that there is some credibility related to former adoption of libertarian principals. In many cases the truth is that these people had only a cursory understanding of the underlying philosophies related to the principles involved, having jumped on a fad promising drug legalization or related policies, before reverting back into statism. While there are valid reasons to shift philosophies, generally involving reshuffling of priorities, most "ex-libertarians" online demonstrate little knowledge in the matter.

Anyone who disagrees is a shill

Anyone who lives in an echo-chamber will be skeptical that people actually think differently than them, so when confronted with other opinions Statists often assume that there must be some ulterior motive at play because they couldn't possibly come by such an opinion organically. Clearly, they must have been paid off by whoever supports the policies they espouse, be it the Koch brothers, Trump, Russia, or whatever corporations are most hated at the moment. Of course, the Statist can't possibly know another's inner motive, but that doesn't stop them from trying.

Ban things I don’t like

Whenever something is an inconvenience, a knee-jerk reaction is "there oughta be a law." A natural response to bad things happening is to want to prevent it from ever happening again to anyone else. After any tragedy, since most likely whatever happened was already illegal, Statists generally fixate on other, legal, aspects of the crime with the intention of making it difficult to repeat, not worried about the consequences for other people who do not plan on committing a crime. No inanimate object is inherently good or bad, so eliminating it will not prevent people from doing bad things.

If you don’t like it, just leave

By framing increased State power as a voluntary choice to remain within the State's border, the Statist absolves himself of any wrongdoing as now any victims of State oppression is now only in this predicament by their own volition. There are multiple incorrect assumptions involved, the first of which states that one must leave one's own property to escape the State's clutches, so it's not really his property to begin with---it's the State's. Another issue is, in many countries including the United States there is a tax to renounce one's citizenship, since socialist redistributionism tends to collapse once producers leave the country.

But who will build the roads?

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

---Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

Libertarians hate poor people

In a similar vein, when the elimination of welfare programs is proposed, the first instinct is to jump to the defense of the people these programs are designed to aid. Anyone who doesn't want to help the poor via food stamps etc. must not want the poor to be helped at all, never mind the fact that new technologies provided through free enterprise is reducing the impact of absolute poverty worldwide while the poverty rate in the United States has remained stagnant since the introduction of the Great Society in the late sixties after consistently falling for decades before that.

Regulations make the market freer

People, if left alone, will tear each other apart and destroy all of civilization, according to Hobbes. Therefore, for humanity to be truly free, they must be regulated to save them from themselves. This results from both a misunderstanding of human nature and the nature of markets. Human nature, as observed by John Locke, is to improve one's one life and protect one's own property, not to harm another's. Markets and property are created to harness human creativity and lust for self-improvement by requiring one to help others in order to improve his own life through voluntary transactions.

The State knows more than you

Statists tend to believe, whether via the Dunning-Kruger Effect or otherwise, that they are more intelligent than the average human. Not only that, they consider themselves, or whoever is in charge, to be more intelligent than the sum total of all human knowledge contained in the market. Each and every person's desires, needs, and abilities, working together in a decentralized system in which one only needs to worry about himself cannot possibly work, and must be replaced with a single vision by one man or a small group. Of course, centrally-planned economies never work since even the most intelligent supercomputer on the planet cannot hope to approximate the capacity required to supersede all of humanity---even with a tremendous energy cost.

Capitalism/Property can’t exist without the State

The concept that State protections are required to maintain property rights is not a new one, having existed since medieval times at least. Simply put, it implies that individuals are incapable of defending themselves and their property, which is disproved every time a home invader is stopped in his tracks by the gun-toting homeowner, which happens quite often since according to CDC data there are at least 300 thousand defensive gun uses each year in the United States.

The State owns all property

The crux of property rights is that the owner of that property has absolute control of his property and nobody else's. For the State to control what he does with his own property, the State must own his property and not him. This concept is central to socialist and collectivist theory, but it falls apart vary quickly due to the tragedy of the commons, since everyone who has access to the commons will assume everyone else will work to produce while he can take more, leading to the formation of the State to force everyone to put in what's necessary. In the Soviet Union it was said that "we would pretend to work and they would pretend to pay us."

Truth derives from popularity

The central tenet of democracy is that the majority's actions are always justified. Any time an opinion poll is used to support an argument, this fallacy is invoked, effectively saying since most people agree it must be true. There are many examples, though, of absolutely abhorrent policies to be supported by the majority of people in particular regions such as slavery, plunder, and even genocide. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny, the only difference is the quantity of tyrants involved.

No True Scotsman

Utopia has never been achieved, therefore the socialist's Utopian system has never been attempted. Of course this is a well-defined fallacy where one cannot arbitrarily redefine their statement to exclude unwanted examples.

I don’t understand consent

Taking another's property without consent is theft. Taxation is taken from another even if they do not consent under threat of violence.To avoid considering taxation theft, Statists must suffer from a misunderstanding of the entire concept of consent.